Chasm City

TWENTY-SEVEN

We landed with the absolute minimum of ceremony.

Chanterelle’s cable-car had come to rest on a ledge of flat metal buttressed out from the side of Escher Heights, large enough to accommodate about a dozen other vehicles. Most of them were cable-cars, but there were a couple of stubby-winged volantors. Like all the other flying machines I had seen in the city, they had the sleek, hyper-adapted look which told me they had been built before the plague. It must have been difficult, flying them through the warped thicket the city had become, but perhaps the owners just enjoyed the challenge of flying through the tangle. Perhaps it was even a kind of high-risk sport.

People were coming and going from their vehicles, some of which were private and some of which carried the insignia of taxi firms. Other people were just standing around the edge of the landing pad, peering at the rest of the city through pedestal-mounted telescopes. Everyone, without exception, was outlandishly dressed, in billowing capes or overcoats, offset with studiedly bizarre headgear, patterned in a riot of colours and textures which made even the surrounding architecture look a little on the restrained side. People wore masks or hid behind shimmering veils or elegant fans and parasols. There were bio-engineered pets on leashes, creatures which conformed to no known taxonomy, like cats with lizard crests. And some of the pets were not even as strange as their owners. There were people who had become centaurs; fully quadrupedal. There were people who, while still basically conforming to the standard-issue human shape, had twisted and stretched it so far that they looked like avant garde statues. One woman had elongated her skull to such an extent that it resembled the horned beak of an exotic bird. Another man had transformed himself into one of the ancient mythic prototypes of an extraterrestrial, his body preposterously thin and elongated, his dark slitted eyes like almonds.

Chanterelle told me these kind of changes could be effected in days; weeks at the most. It was possible that someone who was sufficiently determined could reshape their body image a dozen times in a year; with the same frequency with which I thought about cutting my hair.

And I expected to find Reivich in such a place?

“If I were you,” Chanterelle said, “I wouldn’t stand around staring all day. I take it you don’t want people to realise you aren’t from around here?”

I felt the ice-slug gun in my pocket and hoped that she saw my arm tense as I found it. “Just walk on. When I want advice I’ll ask for it.” Chanterelle continued wordlessly, but after a few steps I began to feel guilty at snapping at her so strongly. “I’m sorry; I realise you were trying to help.”

“It’s in my interests,” the woman said, out of the corner of her mouth, as if sharing an anecdote. “I don’t want you attracting so much attention that someone makes a move on you and I end up getting caught in the crossfire.”

“Thanks for the concern.”

“It’s self-preservation. How could I feel concerned for you when you’ve just hurt my friends and I don’t even know your name?”

“Your friends will be okay,” I said. “This time tomorrow they won’t even be limping, unless they choose to keep their injuries for show. And they’ll have a very good story to tell in hunt circles.”

“What about your name, then?”

“Call me Tanner,” I said, and forced her on.

A warm, moist wind blew across us as we crossed the pad towards the arched entrance which led back into Escher Heights. A few palanquins darted ahead of us like moving tombstones. At least it had decided not to rain. Perhaps rain was less frequent in this part of the city, or perhaps we were sufficiently high to escape the worst of it. My clothes were still wet from standing in the Mulch, but in this respect Chanterelle looked no better than I.

The arch led into a brightly lit enclosure cool with perfumed air, the ceiling strung with lanterns and banners and slowly spinning circulators. The corridor followed a gentle curve to the right, crossing ornamental pools via stone bridges. For the second time since arriving in the city I saw koi gaping up at me.

“What’s the big deal with the fish?” I asked.

“You shouldn’t talk about them like that. They mean a lot to us.”

“But they’re just koi.”

“Yes, and it was just koi that gave us immortality. Or the first steps towards it, anyway. They live a long time, koi. Even in the wild, they don’t really die of old age. They just get larger and larger until their hearts can’t cope. But it’s not the same as dying of old age.”

I heard Chanterelle murmur something which might have been “koi be blessed” as she crossed the bridge, and allowed my own lips to echo the sentiment. I didn’t want to be seen or doing anything unusual.

The walls were crystalline, an endlessly repeating motif of bustling octagons, but at intermittent distances they had been hollowed out to admit little boutiques and parlours, offering services in florid scrawls of neon or pulsing holographic light. Canopy people were shopping or strolling, most of them couples who at least looked young, although there were very few children present, and those I saw might well have been neotenous adults in their latest body image, or even androform pets programmed with a few childlike phrases.

Chanterelle led me into a much larger chamber, a huge vaulted hall of crystalline magnificence, into which several malls and plazas converged on multiple levels. Chandeliers the size of re-entry capsules hung from the ceiling. The paths tangled around each other, meandering past koi ponds and ornamental waterfalls, encircling pagodas and teahouses. The centre of the atrium was given over to a huge glass tank, encased in smoked filigreed metal. There was something in the tank, but there were too many people packed around the perimeter, jostling parasols and fans and leashed pets, for me to see what it was.

“I’m going to sit down at that table,” I said, waiting until Chanterelle acknowledged me. “You’re going to walk over to that teahouse and order a cup of tea for me and something for yourself. Then you’re going to walk back to the table and you’re going to look like you’re enjoying it.”

“You’re going to keep that gun on me the whole time?”

“Look on it as a compliment. I just can’t keep my eyes off you.”

“You’re hilarious, Tanner.”

I smiled and eased myself into the chair, suddenly conscious of the Mulch filth in which I was caked, and the fact that, surrounded by the gaudily dressed canopy strollers, I looked like an undertaker at a carnival.

I half expected Chanterelle not to return with the tea. Did she really think I would shoot her here, in the back? Did she also imagine I had the skill to be able to aim the gun from my pocket, and not run the risk of hitting someone else? She should have just strolled away from me, and that would have been the end of our acquaintance. And—like her friends—she would have a very good story to tell, even if the night’s hunting had not gone quite as planned. I would not have blamed her. I tried to summon up some dislike for her, but nothing much welled up. I could see things from Zebra’s side clearly enough, but what Chanterelle had said also made sense to me. She believed the people they hunted were bad people who ought to die for what they had done. Chanterelle was wrong about the victims, but how was she to know? From her point of view—denied the exquisite viewpoint which I had experienced thanks to Waverly—Chanterelle’s actions were almost laudable. Wasn’t she doing the Mulch a favour by culling its sickest?

It was enough that I allowed this notion into my head, even if I stopped short of preparing a bed for it.

Sky Haussmann would have been very proud of me.

“Don’t look so grateful, Tanner.” Chanterelle had returned with the tea.

“Why did you come back?”

She placed the two cups on the ironwork top of the table, then lowered herself into the seat opposite me, as sinuously as any cat. I wondered if Chanterelle’s nervous system had been adjusted to give her that edge of felinity, or whether it just came from a lot of practice. “I suppose,” she said, “I wasn’t quite bored with you yet. Quite the opposite, perhaps. Intrigued. And now that we’re somewhere public, I don’t find you half as threatening.”

I sipped the tea. It was almost tasteless, the oral equivalent of an exquisitely pale watercolour.

“There must be more to it than that.”

“You kept your word about my friends. And you could have killed them, I think. But instead you did them a favour. You showed them what pain is really like—real pain; not the soft-edged approximation you get from experientials—and, like you said, you gave them something to brag about afterwards. I’m right, aren’t I? You could have killed them just as easily, and it would not have made any difference to your plans.”

“What makes you think I have plans?”

“The way you ask questions. I also think that, whatever it is you need to do, you don’t have long to do it.”

“Can I ask another question?”

Chanterelle nodded, and used the moment to remove the cat’s-eye mask from her face. Her eyes were leonine, inset with a vertical pupil, but other than that her face was rather human, broad and open, with high cheekbones, framed by a halo of auburn curls which tumbled to her neckline.

“What is it, Tanner?”

“Just before I shot your friends, one of them said something. It might have been you, but I don’t remember so well.”

“Go on. What was it?”

“That there was something wrong with my eyes.”

“That was me,” Chanterelle said, uneasily.

So I had not been imagining it. “What did you say? What was it you saw?”

Her voice lowered now, as if she was conscious of how strange the whole conversation had become.

“It was like they were glowing, like there were two glowing dots in your face.” She spoke quickly, nervously. “I assumed you must have been wearing some kind of mask, and that you discarded it before you emerged again. But you weren’t, were you?”

“No. No, I wasn’t. But I wish I was.”

She looked into my eyes, the vertical slits of her own eyes narrowing as she focused intently. “Whatever it was, it isn’t there now. Are you telling me you don’t know why that happened?”

“I guess,” I said, finishing the watery tea with no great enthusiasm, “it will have to remain one of life’s little mysteries.”

“What kind of an answer is that?”

“The best I’m capable of giving at this moment in time. And if that sounds like the kind of thing someone who was a little scared of what the truth might hold might say, maybe you’re not entirely wrong.” I reached under the coat and scratched my chest, my skin itching beneath the sweat-sodden Mendicant clothes. “I’d rather drop the subject for now.”

“Sorry I raised it,” Chanterelle said, heavy with irony. “Well, what happens now, Tanner? You’ve already told me you were surprised that I came back. That suggests to me that my presence isn’t vital to you, or you’d have done something about it. Does it mean we go our separate ways now?”

“You almost sound disappointed.” I wondered if Chanterelle was aware that my hand had not been on the hilt of the gun for several minutes now, and that the weapon had barely entered my thoughts during that time. “Am I that fascinating to you, or are you just more bored than I imagined?”

“A bit of both, probably. But you are fascinating, Tanner. Worse than that, you’re a puzzle I’ve only half solved.”

“Half already? You’d better slow down. I’m not as unfathomable as you think. Scratch the surface and you might be surprised at how little lies beneath. I’m just—”

What was I going to tell her—just a soldier, just a man keeping his word? Just a fool who did not even know when it was time to break it?

I stood up, conspicuously removing my hand from the gun pocket. “I could use your help, Chanterelle, that’s all. But there’s not much more to me than meets the eye. If you want to show me something of this place, I’d be grateful. But you can walk away now.”

“Do you have any money, Tanner?”

“A little. Nothing that would amount to much here, I’m afraid.”

“Show me what you have.”

I pulled out a fistful of greasy Ferris notes, laying them in their sad entirety on the table. “What does that buy me, another cup of tea if I’m lucky?”

“I don’t know. It’s enough to buy you another set of clothes, which I think you could use if you want to blend in at least approximately.”

“Do I look that out of place?”

“You look so out of place, Tanner, you might be in serious danger of starting a fashion. But somehow I don’t think that’s quite what you had in mind.”

“Not really, no.”

“I don’t know Escher Heights well enough to recommend the best, but I saw some boutiques on the way in which we should be able to outfit you.”

“I’d like to look at that tank first, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, I know what that is. That’s Methuselah. I’d forgotten they kept him here.”

I knew the name, vaguely, and I had the impression it had already been half-remembered once this evening. But Chanterelle was leading me away. “We can come back later, when you don’t stand out so much.”

I sighed and put up my hands in surrender. “You can show me the rest of Escher Heights as well.”

“Why not. The night’s still young, after all.”

Chanterelle made some calls while we walked to a nearby boutique, chasing up her friends and establishing that they were all alive and safe in the Canopy, but she did not leave a message for any of them, and then never mentioned them again. That, I supposed, was how it went: many of the people I saw in Escher Heights would be cognisant of the Game, and might even follow it avidly, but none would admit it to themselves, beyond the private parlours where the sport’s existence was acknowledged and celebrated.

The boutique was staffed by two gloss-black bipedal servitors, far more sophisticated than any I had seen in the city so far. They kept oozing insincere compliments, even when I knew that I looked like a gorilla which had accidentally broken into a theatrical supplier’s. With Chanterelle’s guidance, I settled on a combination which wouldn’t offend or bankrupt me. The trousers and jacket were of similar cut to the Mendicant clothes I now gratefully discarded, but were cut from fabrics which were wildly ostentatious by comparison, all dancing metallic threads in coruscant golds and silvers. I felt conspicuous, but when we left the boutique—Vadim’s coat billowing raffishly behind me—people gave me no more than a fleeting glance, rather than the studied suspicion I’d elicited before.

“So,” Chanterelle said, “are you going to tell me where you’re from?”

“What have you worked out for yourself?”

“Well, you’re not from around here. Not from Yellowstone; almost certainly not from the Rust Belt; probably not from any other enclave in the system.”

“I’m from Sky’s Edge,” I said. “I came in on the Orvieto. Actually, I assumed you’d have figured out that much from my Mendicant clothes.”

“I did, except the coat confused me.”

“This old thing? It was donated to me by an old friend in the Rust Belt.”

“Sorry, but no one donates a coat like that.” Chanterelle fingered one of the lustrous, rough-cut patches which had been quilted over it. “You have no idea what this signifies, have you?”

“All right; I stole it. From someone who had stolen it himself, I expect. A man who had worse coming to him.”

“That’s fractionally more plausible. But when I first saw it, it made me wonder. And then when you mentioned Dream Fuel…” She had lowered her voice to speak the last two words, barely breathing them.

“Sorry, you’ve lost me completely. What does Dream Fuel have to do with a coat like this?”

But even as I said it I remembered how Zebra had hinted at the same connection. “More than you seem to realise, Tanner. You asked questions about Dream Fuel which made you look like an outsider, and yet you were wearing the kind of coat which said you were part of the distribution system; a supplier.”

“You weren’t telling me everything you knew about Dream Fuel then, were you?”

“Almost everything. But the coat made me wonder if you were trying to trick me, so I was careful what I said.”

“So now tell me what else you know. How big is the supply? I’ve seen people inject themselves with a few cubic centimetres at a time, with maybe a hundred or so ccs in reserve. I’m guessing use of Dream Fuel’s restricted to a relatively small number of people; probably you and your elite, risk-taking friends and not many others. A few thousand regular users across the city, at the very maximum?”

“Probably not far off the mark.”

“Which would imply a regular supply, across the city, of—what? A few hundred ccs per user per year? Maybe a million ccs per year across the whole city? That isn’t much, really—a cubic metre or so of Dream Fuel.”

“I don’t know.” Chanterelle looked uncomfortable discussing what was obviously an addiction. “That seems about right. All I know is the stuff’s harder to get hold of than it used to be a year or two ago. Most of us have had to ration our use; three or four spikes a week at the most.”

“And no one else has tried manufacturing it?”

“Yes, of course. There’s always someone trying to sell fake Dream Fuel. But it’s not just a question of quality. It’s either Fuel or it isn’t.”

I nodded, but I didn’t really understand. “It’s obviously a seller’s market. Gideon must be the only person who has access to the right manufacturing process, or whatever it is. You postmortals need it badly; without it you’re dead meat. That means Gideon can keep the price as high as he likes, within reason. What I don’t see is why he’d restrict the supply.”

“He’s raised the price, don’t you worry.”

“Which might simply be because he can’t sell as much of it as he used to, because there’s a bottle-neck in the manufacturing chain; maybe a problem with getting the raw materials or something.” Chanterelle shrugged, so I continued, “All right, then. Explain what the coat means, will you?”

“The man who donated you that coat was a supplier, Tanner. That’s what those patches on your coat mean. Its original owner must have had a connection to Gideon.”

I thought back to when Quirrenbach and I had searched Vadim’s cabin, reminding myself now that Quirrenbach and Vadim had been secret accomplices. “He had Dream Fuel,” I said. “But this was up in the Rust Belt. He can’t have been that close to the supply.”

No, I added to myself, but what about his friend? Perhaps Vadim and Quirrenbach had worked together in more ways than one: Quirrenbach was the real supplier and Vadim merely his distributor in the Rust Belt.

I already wanted to speak to Quirrenbach again. Now I’d have more than one thing to ask him about.

“Maybe your friend wasn’t that close to the supply,” Chanterelle said. “But whatever the case, there’s something you need to understand. All the stories you hear about Gideon? About people vanishing because they ask the wrong questions?”

“Yes?” I asked.

“They’re all true.”

Afterwards I let Chanterelle take me to the palanquin races. I thought there might be a chance that Reivich would show his face at an event like that, but although I searched the crowds of spectators, I never saw anyone who might have been him.

The circuit was a complicated, looping track that wormed its way through many levels, doubling under and over itself. Now and then it even extended beyond the building, suspended far above the Mulch. There were chicanes and obstacles and traps, and the parts which looped out into the night were not barriered, so there was nothing to stop a palanquin going over the edge if the occupant took the corner too sharply. There were ten or eleven palanquins per race, each travelling box elaborately ornamented, and there were stringent rules about what was and wasn’t permitted. Chanterelle said these rules were taken only semi-seriously, and it wasn’t unusual for someone to equip their palanquin with weapons to use against the other racers—projecting rams, for instance, to shove an opponent over the edge on one of the aerial bends.

The races had begun as a bet between two bored, palanquin-riding immortals, she said. But now almost anyone could take part. Half the palanquins were being ridden by people who had nothing to fear from the plague. Major fortunes were lost and won—but mainly lost—in the course of a night’s racing.

I suppose it was better than hunting.

“Listen,” Chanterelle said as we were leaving the races. “What do you know about the Mixmasters?”

“Not too much,” I said, giving as little away as possible. The name was vaguely familiar, but no more than that. “Why do you ask?”

“You really don’t know, do you? That settles it, Tanner; you really aren’t from around here, as if there was any doubt.”

The Mixmasters predated the Melding Plague and were one of the system’s comparatively few old social orders which had weathered the blight more or less intact. Like the Mendicants, they were a selfsupporting guild, and like the Mendicants, they concerned themselves with God. But there the similarity ended. The Mendicants—no matter what their other agendas happened to be—were there to serve and glorify their deity. The Mixmasters, on the other hand, wanted to become God.

And—by some definitions—they’d long ago succeeded.

When the Amerikanos settled Yellowstone, the better part of four centuries ago, they brought with them all the genetic expertise of their culture: genomic sequences, linkage and function maps for literally millions of Terran species, including all the higher primates and mammals. They knew genetics intimately. It was how they had arrived on Yellowstone in the first place, sending their fertilised eggs via frail robot envoys; machines which, upon arriving, fabricated artificial wombs and brought those eggs to term. They hadn’t lasted, of course—but they had left their legacy. DNA sequences allowed later descendants to merge Amerikano blood with their own, enriching the biodiversity of the resettlers, who came by ship rather than seedcarrying robot.

But the Amerikanos left more than that. They also left vast files of expertise, knowledge which had not so much been lost as allowed to grow stale, so that subtle relationships and dependencies were no longer appreciated. It was the Mixmasters who appropriated this wisdom. They became the guardians of all biological and genetic expertise, and they expanded that sphere of brilliance via trade with Ultras, who occasionally offered snippets of foreign genetic information, alien genomes or manipulative techniques pioneered in other systems. But, for all this, the Mixmasters had seldom been at the hub of Yellowstone power. The system, after all, was in thrall to the Sylveste clan, that powerful old-line family which advocated transcendence via cybernetic modes of consciousness-expansion.

The Mixmasters had made a living, of course, since not everyone subscribed utterly to the Sylveste doctrine, and also because the gross failures of the Eighty had soured many on the idea of transmigration. But their work had been discreet: correcting genetic abnormalities in newborns; ironing out inherited defects in supposedly pure clan lines. It was work which became more invisible the more adeptly it was done, like an exceedingly efficient assassination, in which the crime did not appear to have happened at all, and in which no one remembered who the victim was in the first place. The Mixmasters worked like the restorers of damaged art, trying to bring as little of their own vision to the matter as possible. And yet the power of transformation they held was awesome. But it was held in check, because society could not tolerate two massively transforming pressures operating at once, and on some level the Mixmasters knew this. To unleash their art would have been to rip Yellowstone culture to shreds.

But then the plague had come. Society had indeed been ripped to shreds, but like an asteroid blasted with a too-small demolition charge, the pieces had not gained sufficient escape velocity to fly apart completely. Yellowstone society had crashed back into existence—fragmented, jumbled and liable to crumble at any instant, but it was society nonetheless. And a society in which the ideologies of cybernetics were, momentarily, a kind of heresy.

The Mixmasters had slipped effortlessly into the power vacuum.

“They maintain parlours throughout the Canopy,” Chanterelle said. “Places were you can get your heritage read, check out your clan affiliations, or look over the brochures for makeovers.” She indicated her eyes. “Anything you weren’t born with, or weren’t meant to inherit. Can be transplants—although that’s reasonably rare, unless you’re after something outrageous like a set of Pegasus wings. More likely it’s going to be genetic. The Mixmasters rewire your DNA so that the changes happen naturally—or as close to naturally as makes no difference.”

“How would that happen?”

“It’s simple. When you cut yourself, does the wound heal over in fur or scales? Of course not—there’s a knowledge of your body’s architecture buried deep in your DNA. All the Mixmasters do is edit that knowledge, very selectively, so that your body carries on doing its job of maintenance against injury and wear and tear, but with the wrong local blueprint. You end up growing something that was never meant to be expressed in your phenotype.” Chanterelle paused. “Like I said, there are parlours throughout the Canopy where they ply their trade. If you’re curious about your eyes, perhaps we should stop by.”

“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 ashgrey, 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 immediately 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 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. 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.

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.