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 seed-carrying 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 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 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.’
