Methuselah looked very much the same as when I had last seen him, floating in his tank like a monstrous piscine iceberg. There was a small crowd around him, just as before — people who would linger for a few minutes at the marvel of the age before realising that, really, all it was was a large old fish, and that, size apart, there was really nothing about Methuselah which was intrinsically more interesting than the younger, leaner, nimbler koi which thrived in the ponds. Worse than that, in fact, since the one thing I noticed was that no one turned away from Methuselah looking quite as happy as when they had arrived. Not only was there something disappointing about the fish, there was something ineluctably sad as well. Maybe they were too scared that in Methuselah they glimpsed the inert grey hulk of their own futures.
Zebra and I drank tea, and no one paid us any attention.
‘The woman you met — what was her name again?’
‘Chanterelle Sammartini,’ I said.
‘Pransky never explained what happened to her. Were you together when he found you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’d argued.’
Zebra did a creditable double-take. ‘Wasn’t arguing part of the bargain? I mean, if you kidnap someone, don’t you generally assume that there’s going to be some arguing?’
‘I didn’t kidnap her, no matter what you think. I invited her to take me to the Canopy.’
‘With a gun.’
‘She wasn’t going to accept the invitation otherwise.’
‘Good point. And did you keep this gun on her the whole time you were up here?’
‘No,’ I said, not entirely comfortable with this line of debate. ‘No, not at all. It turned out not be necessary. We found we could tolerate each other’s company without it.’
Zebra arched an eyebrow. ‘You and the Canopy rich kid actually hit it off?’
‘After a fashion,’ I said, feeling oddly defensive.
From across the atrium, Methuselah flicked a pelvic fin and the suddenness of the gesture — no matter how feeble or involuntary — generated a mild frisson amongst the onlookers, as if a statue had just twitched. I wondered what kind of synaptic process had triggered that gesture, whether there was any intention behind it, or whether — like the creaking of an old house — Methuselah occasionally just moved, no closer to thought than wood.
‘Did you sleep with her?’ Zebra asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but there just wasn’t time.’
‘You’re not comfortable talking about this, are you?’
‘Would you be?’ I shook my head, as much to clear it of confusion as to deny anything deeper about my relationship with Chanterelle. ‘I expected to hate her for what she did; the way she played the game. But as soon as I started talking to her I realised it wasn’t that simple. From her point of view there was nothing barbaric about it at all.’
‘Nice and convenient, that.’
‘I mean she didn’t realise — or believe — that the victims were not the kind of people she’d been told they were.’
‘Until she met you.’
I nodded carefully. ‘I think I gave her pause for thought.’
‘You’ve given us all pause for thought, Tanner.’ And then Zebra drank what remained of her tea in silence.
‘You again,’ the Mixmaster said, in a tone which conveyed neither pleasure nor disappointment, but a highly refined amalgam of the two. ‘I had imagined that I had answered all your questions satisfactorily during your last visit. Evidently I was mistaken.’ His heavy-lidded gaze alighted on Zebra, a twinge of non-recognition disturbing the genetically enhanced placidity of his expression. ‘Madame, I see, has had a considerable makeover since the last occasion.’
It had been Chanterelle, of course, but I decided to let the bastard have his amusement.
‘She had the number of a good bloodcutter,’ I said.
‘And you emphatically didn’t,’ the Mixmaster said, sealing the outer door of his parlour against other visitors. ‘I’m talking about the eyework, of course,’ he said, ensconcing himself behind his floating console while the two of us stood. ‘But why don’t we dispense with the lie that this work had any connection with bloodcutters?’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Zebra asked, entirely with justification.
‘A small internal matter,’ I said.
‘This gentleman,’ the Mixmaster said, with laboured emphasis on the last word, ‘visited me a day ago, to discuss some genetic and structural anomalies in his eyes. At the time he claimed that the anomalies were the result of inferior intervention by bloodcutters. I was even prepared to believe him, though the edited sequences bore none of the usual signatures of bloodcutter work.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I believe that the changes were done by another faction entirely. Shall I spell it out?’
‘Please do.’
‘The work bears certain signatures which suggest that the sequences were inserted using the genetics techniques common to Ultras. Neither more nor less advanced than bloodcutter or Mixmaster work — just different, and highly individual. I should have realised much sooner.’ He allowed himself a smile, obviously impressed by his own deductive skills. ‘When Mixmasters perform a genetic service, it’s essentially permanent, unless the client specifies otherwise. That doesn’t mean that the work isn’t reversible, in most cases — it just means that the genetic and physiological changes will be stable against reversion to the older form. Bloodcutter work is the same, for the simple reason that bloodcutter sequences are generally bootlegged from Mixmasters, and the ’cutters haven’t the ingenuity to embed obsolescence into those same sequences. They steal code, but they don’t hack it. But Ultranauts do things rather differently.’ The Mixmaster cradled his long and elegant fingers before his chin. ‘Ultras sell their services with an in-built obsolescence; a mutational clock if you will. I’ll spare you the details; suffice to say that, within the viral and enzymic machinery which mediates the expression of the new genes inserted into your own DNA, there is a time-keeping mechanism, a clock which functions by counting the accumulation of randomness in a strand of foreign reference DNA. Needless to say, once these errors exceed a pre-defined limit, cellular machinery is unshackled which suppresses or corrects the altered genes.’ Again the Mixmaster smiled. ‘Of course, I’m simplifying tremendously. For a start, the clocks are set to trigger gradually, so that production of the new proteins and the division of cells into new types doesn’t cease suddenly. Otherwise it could be fatal — especially if the changes allowed you to live in an otherwise hostile environment, like oxygenated water or an ammonia atmosphere.’
‘You’re saying Tanner’s eyes were touched by Ultras?’
‘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.
