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
