“You catch on extraordinarily swiftly. But there’s rather more to it than that.”
“There generally is,” I said.
The Mixmaster danced his hands over the console, fingers plucking at invisible harp strings, causing reams of genetics data to spring into the air, particular sequences of Ts and As and Gs and Cs highlighted and cross-linked to a series of physiological and functional maps of the human eye and the associated brain regions of visual comprehension. He looked like a wizard suddenly accompanied by ghostly—and gory—familiars.
“Something very odd has happened here,” the man said, his fingers ceasing their too-dexterous dance. He sketched a particular block of base-pairs, the cross-linking rungs of DNA. “These are the pairs which are allowed to grow progressively more random; the internal clock.” His finger moved to another highlighted block which looked superficially identical. “And this is the reference map, the unmutated DNA. It’s by comparing these—by noting the number of mutational changes—that the clock is driven.”
“There don’t seem to be very many changes,” Zebra said.
“A few statistically minor point deletions or frame shifts,” the Mixmaster said. “But nothing significant.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“Meaning that the clock has not had very long to run. The two sets of DNA have hardly begun to diverge.” His eyes narrowed. “That means that the work was done very recently; definitely within the last year, and perhaps only a few months ago.”
“Why is that a problem?” Zebra asked.
“Because of this.” Now his finger moved across a densely tangled blob, rendered in lilac. “This is a transcription factor; a protein that regulates the expression of a particular set of genes. It is not, however, a normally occurring human protein. Its only function—and it has been engineered for this purpose—is to suppress the newly inserted genes in your eye. It should not be present in large quantities until the mutational clock has been triggered. Yet I found it in abundance.”
“Could the Ultras have deceived Tanner?”
The Mixmaster shook his head. “Not likely. There’d be no economic gain in doing so. The genetics changes would still have been made, so it’s not as if it would be cheaper for them to reset the clock. In fact it would harm their longterm profits, because Tanner—if that’s your name—would have sought the services of another crew.”
“I take it you have an alternative explanation?”
“I do, but you may not like it.” Once again he delivered a smile of utter salaciousness. “It would be exceedingly difficult to reset the mutational clock to zero without triggering all sorts of secondary anti-tamper safeguards. Even for a Mix master. I could do it, but it would be far from trivial work. But the opposite procedure would be considerably simpler.”
“The opposite procedure?” I leaned forward, feeling that some kind of fundamental revelation was almost within my grasp. It wasn’t a feeling I much enjoyed.
“Setting the clock forward, so that the new genes are switched off.” He said that, and then allowed himself a moment’s contemplative silence, spinning the projected eyeball with the tip of one finger, a singularly macabre globe. “It would be simpler because there would be no safeguards. It would never occur to the Ultras to protect against that kind of tampering, because it would only harm the client. Which is not to say it would be easy. It would, however, be an order of magnitude easier than setting the clock back. It could be attempted by any bloodcutter who understood the problem.”
“Go on.”
His voice took on a gravitas it had lacked a moment earlier, as if he had triggered his own mutational change to deepen the response of his larynx. “For some reason, someone set your clock forward, Tanner.”
Zebra looked at me.
“You mean Tanner’s changes are fading?” she asked. I realised that she still had no idea what form these changes took.
“That was probably the intention,” the Mixmaster said. “Whoever did it was not entirely lacking in competence. Once the clock had been wound, the cells in your eye would have begun manufacturing normal human proteins, cell division following the normal blueprint.” He sighed. “But whoever did it was either sloppy or hasty or both. They reset only a fraction of the clocks, and then imperfectly. There’s a small war going on in your eye, between different components of the Ultra genetics machinery. Whoever tried to reset the clock thought they were turning the machine off, but all they really did was throw a spanner in its works.” A note of sorrow entered his voice. “Such haste. Such dreadful haste. Of course, whoever it was more than deserved to fail. The question is why they thought it was worth doing in the first place.” His eyes opened in expectation, and I realised he thought I was going to give him an answer.
But I saw no sense in giving him that pleasure, much as I would have liked to. Instead I said, “I want a scan. A full-body scan. You can do that, can’t you?”
“It depends what you want it for; the kind of resolution you want me to achieve.”
“Nothing too fine. I just want you to look for something. Tissue damage. Internal. Wounds which may or may not have healed.”
“I can but try,” the man said, gesturing to the couch, a skate-like scanning device already gliding down from the ceiling.
It did not take very long. In all honestly, I would have been surprised if the Mixmaster scan had revealed anything other than what I was dreading and expecting. It was just a question of seeing it revealed in the cold indices of a readout; just a question of finally burying any residual traces of denial—and, for that matter, hope, which might have remained.
The skate imaged my body core, learning my inner secrets via a manifold of sensory techniques. The machine was really just a highly modified form of trawl, adjusted to cope with the cellular and genetic structure of the whole body, rather than the specialised flavours of neural tissue alone. Given time, it could resolve matter down to the atomic level; right to the border of quantum fuzziness, but there was no need for such precision now, and the scan was commensurately rapid.
And what it showed chilled me to the core. Something which should have been there was missing.
Something which should have been missing was there.
THIRTY-TWO
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Zebra said.
She had forced me to sit down in the atrium and drink something hot and sweet and nondescript.
“You can’t begin to imagine.”
“What was so bad, Tanner? It must have been something you were expecting, or you wouldn’t have asked the Mixmaster to give you the scan.”
“Let’s say fearing, rather than expecting, shall we?”
I didn’t know where or when to begin, or even with whom. Ever since arriving around Yellowstone my memories had been damaged, and I’d had the added complication of the indoctrinal virus to deal with. The virus had given me unwelcome glimpses into the psyche of Sky Haussmann, and yet at the same time aspects of my own past had begun to come back into focus; who I was; what I was doing; why I wanted to kill Reivich. All of those things, disturbing as they’d been, I could have come to terms with. But it hadn’t stopped there. It hadn’t even stopped when I started thinking and feeling my way through Sky’s past; vouchsafed secrets no one else knew about his crimes. Nor had it stopped when I started having confused thoughts about Gitta; remembering her from Cahuella’s viewpoint rather than my own.
Even that I could have begun to rationalise, with some effort. Contamination of my own memories by Cahuella’s? Well, it was possible. Memories could be recorded and transferred, after all. I couldn’t begin to imagine why some of Cahuella’s experiences should have become intermingled with my own, but it wasn’t unthinkable that it had happened.
But the truth—the truth that I was beginning to glimpse—was more disturbing than that.
I wasn’t even wearing the right body.
“It isn’t easy to explain,” I said.
Zebra answered in
a hiss; “People don’t just walk into Mix master parlours and ask to be scanned for internal tissue damage—not unless they half expect to find something.”
“No, I . . .” I stopped. Had I imagined it, or had I just seen that face again, near the mingling crowds around Methuselah? Perhaps now I was really hallucinating, pushed over the edge by what the Mixmaster had shown me. Perhaps it was my destiny to see Reivich everywhere I looked now, no matter what the circumstances.
“Tanner . . . ?”
I dared not look any deeper into the crowd. “There should have been something there,” I said. “A wound which should have been present, but wasn’t. Something which happened to me once. It was healed . . . but nothing heals that perfectly.”
“What type of wound?”
“My memories tell me I lost a foot. I can tell you exactly how it happened; exactly how it felt. But there’s no sign of the injury.”
“Well, the regrowth procedure must have been very sophisticated.”
“What about the other wound, then? A wound the man I was working for sustained at the same time? He took a beam-weapon discharge right through him, Zebra. That showed up.”
“You’re losing me, Tanner.” She looked around, her gaze catching on something or someone for an instant before returning to me. “Are you trying to tell me you’re not who you think you are?”
“I’m giving it some serious consideration, let’s say that much.” I waited a moment, then added, “You’ve seen him too, haven’t you?”
“What?”
“Reivich. I just saw him; for a moment I thought I might be imagining him. But I wasn’t, was I?”
Zebra opened her mouth to say something—a denial, quick and fluid, but it just didn’t come. Her veneer had cracked. “Everything I told you is true,” she said quietly, when words returned. “I’m not working for him any more. But you’re right. You did just see him.” After a pause, she said, “Except that isn’t really Reivich.”
I nodded; I’d half guessed the truth already. “A lure?”
“Something like that, yes.” She consulted her tea. “You knew there’d be time for him to change his appearance as soon as he arrived in the city. In fact, it would be the only sensible thing for him to do. And that’s exactly what he did. The real Reivich is out there now, somewhere in the city, but you’d need to take a tissue sample, or get him under a Mixmaster scanner before you’d know for sure. And even then you might not be certain. They can change everything, you know, given time. Even Reivich’s DNA might not betray him, given enough money.” Zebra paused. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the man, still hovering at the fringe of the crowd gathered round the big fish. It was him, yes—or at least an extremely good facsimile. Zebra said, “Reivich knew his cover was good, but he still wanted to flush you out. That way he could sleep at night and—if he wished—revert to his old appearance and identity.”
“So he persuaded someone to assume his shape.”
“There was no persuasion involved. The man was more than willing.”
“Someone with a death wish?”
She shook her head. “No more than any other immortal in the Canopy. His name is Voronoff, I believe, although I don’t know for sure, since I was never that close to Reivich. You won’t have heard of Voronoff, but his name’s fairly well-known in Canopy circles. He’s one of the most extreme Gamers; someone for whom the hunt was always going to be too tame. He’s good, too—or else he wouldn’t still be alive.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I have heard of Voronoff.”
I told her about the man I had seen jumping into the mist in the Chasm, when Sybilline had taken me to the restaurant at the end of the stalk.
“That makes sense,” she said. “Voronoff’s into anything involving extreme personal risk, provided there’s a large element of skill involved. Dangerous sports, anything which gives a genuine adrenalin kick, and which forces him to confront the thin border between mortality and his own longevity. He would never stoop to hunting now; he’d just regard it as an amusement, not a real game. Not because of its unfairness, but because there’s no personal risk to the participants.”
“Except for one participant, of course.”
“You know what I mean.”
She was silent for a moment before continuing, “People like Voronoff are extremists. For them the usual methods of controlling boredom just don’t work any more. It’s like they developed a tolerance for it. They need something stronger.”
“And putting himself in the firing line was just the ticket.”
“It was controlled. Voronoff had a network of spies and informers keeping track of you. When you first thought you’d seen him, he’d already seen you.” She swallowed. “The first time, he kept Methuselah between you and himself. It wasn’t any accident. He was more in control than you ever realised.”
“It was a mistake, though. He made it too easy. He made me wonder what was going on.”
“Yes,” Zebra said, knowingly. “But by then it was far too late to stop him. Voronoff was out of our control.”
I looked into her faintly striped face, not needing to prompt her further. She said, “Voronoff liked his role too much. It suited him too well. For a long time he acted the way he was meant to—keeping a discreet distance; never letting you see him. The idea was that he would plant a trail of clues which would lead you to him, but in such a way that you thought you’d done all the work yourself. But he wanted more than that.”
“More danger.”
“Yes.” She said it with deep finality. “Laying down clues and waiting for you to follow them wasn’t enough for Voronoff. He started to make himself more prominent—placing himself at ever-greater risk, but always maintaing an edge of control. That’s why I said he’s good. But Reivich didn’t like it, for obvious reasons. Voronoff was no longer serving him. He was serving himself; finding a new way to stave off the boredom. And I think it worked, being in that role.”
“Not for me it didn’t.”
I stood up, almost upsetting the table as I did so. And one hand was already beginning the journey to my pocket.
“Tanner,” Zebra said, quickly, reaching for the hem of my coat as I stepped away from her, “killing him won’t change a thing.”
“Voronoff,” I said, at the top of my voice—not actually shouting it, but projecting like a actor of great renown. “Voronoff—turn around and step away from the crowd.”
The gun gleamed in my hand, and now people began to notice it for the first time.
The man who looked like Reivich met my gaze and managed not to look too surprised. But he was not the only one who met my gaze. I had managed to get everyone’s attention by now, and those who were not trying to read my expression were fixated by the gun. If the hunt was as endemic amongst Canopy dwellers as I had been led to believe, many of these people would have seen and handled weapons of far greater potency than the pistol I hefted now. But never in a place as public as this; never with such crass vulgarity. Judging by the looks of shock and bewilderment and revulsion I saw, I might as well have been pissing on the ornamental lawn which fringed the koi pond.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me, Voronoff.” I sounded sweetly reasonable to my own ears. “I know who you are and what this is all about. If you know anything about me you’ll also know that I’m fully capable of using this.” I had the gun aimed in his direction now, double-handed stance with my feet slightly spread.
“Drop it, Mirabel.”
It was not a voice I had heard recently, nor had it come from the crowd. I felt a touch of soft metallic cold against the nape of my neck.
“Are you deaf? I said drop the piece. Do it fast or your head’ll be following it down.”
I started lowering the piece, but that wasn’t good enough for the speaker standing behind me. He increased the pressure against my neck in a manner which strongly suggested it would be in my best interest to let the gun drop.
I did.
“You,” the ma
n said, evidently addressing Zebra. “Kick the gun to me, and don’t even think about trying anything creative.”
She did as she was told.
I saw a hand reach out in my peripheral vision and snatch the gun from the ground; the pressure of the weapon against my neck changed slightly as the man knelt. But he was good; I could tell that, so—like Zebra—I wasn’t tempted to even think about trying anything creative. That was good, because I was all out of creativity.
“Voronoff, you fool,” said the voice. “Look what you nearly got us into.” And then I heard clicking sounds as the gun was inspected, followed by a tut of amusement from the hidden speaker, whose voice I almost recognised. “It’s empty. The damn thing was empty all along.”
“News to me,” I said.
“I did it,” Zebra said, shrugging. “You can’t blame me, can you? I had a feeling you might end up pointing it at me, so I just took a precaution.”
“Next time, don’t bother,” I said.
“Not that it exactly mattered,” Zebra said, doing a poor job of masking her annoyance. “You never even tried to fire the fucking thing, Tanner.”
I angled my eyes upwards, as if I was trying to look behind my own head. “Are you involved with this clown?”
That got me an acute stabbing pain between the ears. The man said, projecting his voice out to the people who were staring at us, “All right; this is Canopy security; the situation is under control.” I saw a flash of identity in my peripheral vision; a leatherbound card embossed with scrolling data which he waved at the crowd.
It seemed to have the desired effect; about half the people drifted away and the others tried to pretend that they had never really been interested in what was going on. The pressure eased and the man sidled around to my front, pulling up a seat for himself. Voronoff had also joined us, the exact facsimile of Reivich disporting himself opposite me with a scowl of displeasure written across his face.
“Sorry for spoiling your little game,” I said.
The other man was Quirrenbach, although he had changed his appearance since our last encounter, looking meaner, leaner and a great deal less patient and bewildered. The gun in his hand was small and dainty enough to have been a gimmicky cigarette-lighter.