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 learned 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 Of course they cut all the safety margins and use outdated sequences.”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 Mixmaster 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—just 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 infra-red 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 disorientated 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. Giv
en 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.
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.”
“There’d be little point lying, would there?”
“You have to start talking to me, Tanner. You have to start telling me something. You said I wouldn’t like the truth because it would complicate things. Well, trust me—this is complicated enough. Are you ready to let some of that mask slip, or are we going to carry on this game?”
I was still playing the whole incident over in my head. The face had been that of Argent Reivich, and he had been standing only a few metres from me, in a public place.
Was it possible he had actually seen me all along, and was much cleverer than I had realised? If he’d recognised me, he could have left the area in the opposite direction while I walked around Methuselah. I’d been too fixated on the idea of him still standing up against the glass to pay enough attention to the people who had just left. So it was possible, yes. But in accepting that Reivich had been aware of my presence all along, I opened myself up to a far more unsettling set of questions. Why had he stayed there, if he had already seen me? And how had we met each other so easily? I hadn’t even been looking for him at that point; I was just getting the feel of the area befo
re I began the real work of tightening the net. As if that was not enough, now that I reviewed the few moments which separated my discovery of Reivich from the moment when I realised he had left, I became aware that something else had happened. I had seen something or someone, but my mind had suppressed it, concentrating my attention on the imminent kill.
I had seen another face in the glass—another face that I knew, standing very close to Reivich.
She had erased the surface markings, but the underlying bone structure was reasonably intact, and her expression very familiar.
I had seen Zebra.
“I’m still waiting,” Chanterelle said. “There’s only so much of that meaningful frown I can take, you know.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just—” I found myself grinning. “I almost think you might like me for who I am.”
“Don’t push your luck, Tanner. Only a couple of hours ago you were pointing a gun at me. Most relationships that start like that tend to go downhill.”
“Ordinarily, I’d agree. But you also happened to be pointing a gun at me, and your gun was considerably larger than mine.”
“Hmm, maybe.” She sounded far from convinced. “But if we’re going to take it any further—and make of that what you will—you’d better start elaborating on that dark and mysterious past of yours. Even if there are things you don’t really want me to know.”
“Oh, there are plenty of those, believe me.”
“Then get them out into the open. By the time we get back to my place, I want to know why that man was going to die. And if I were you, I’d seriously try and persuade me that he deserves it—whoever it was. Otherwise you might begin to slip in my estimation.”
The car pitched and swayed, but I no longer found the motion really sickening.
“He deserves to die,” I said. “But I can’t say he’s a bad man. If I’d been in his place, I’d have done exactly what he did.” Except done it professionally, I thought, and not left anyone alive afterwards.
“Mm, bad start, Tanner. But please continue.”
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