‘Because of this.’ Now his finger moved across a densely tangled blob, rendered in lilac. ‘This is a transcription factor; a protein that regulates the expression of a particular set of genes. It is not, however, a normally occurring human protein. Its only function — and it has been engineered for this purpose — is to suppress the newly inserted genes in your eye. It should not be present in large quantities until the mutational clock has been triggered. Yet I found it in abundance.’
‘Could the Ultras have deceived Tanner?’
The Mixmaster shook his head. ‘Not likely. There’d be no economic gain in doing so. The genetics changes would still have been made, so it’s not as if it would be cheaper for them to reset the clock. In fact it would harm their longterm profits, because Tanner — if that’s your name — would have sought the services of another crew.’
‘I take it you have an alternative explanation?’
‘I do, but you may not like it.’ Once again he delivered a smile of utter salaciousness. ‘It would be exceedingly difficult to reset the mutational clock to zero without triggering all sorts of secondary anti-tamper safeguards. Even for a Mixmaster. I could do it, but it would be far from trivial work. But the opposite procedure would be considerably simpler.’
‘The opposite procedure?’ I leaned forward, feeling that some kind of fundamental revelation was almost within my grasp. It wasn’t a feeling I much enjoyed.
‘Setting the clock forward, so that the new genes are switched off.’ He said that, and then allowed himself a moment’s contemplative silence, spinning the projected eyeball with the tip of one finger, a singularly macabre globe. ‘It would be simpler because there would be no safeguards. It would never occur to the Ultras to protect against that kind of tampering, because it would only harm the client. Which is not to say it would be easy. It would, however, be an order of magnitude easier than setting the clock back. It could be attempted by any bloodcutter who understood the problem.’
‘Go on.’
His voice took on a gravitas it had lacked a moment earlier, as if he had triggered his own mutational change to deepen the response of his larynx. ‘For some reason, someone set your clock forward, Tanner.’
Zebra looked at me.
‘You mean Tanner’s changes are fading?’ she asked. I realised that she still had no idea what form these changes took.
‘That was probably the intention,’ the Mixmaster said. ‘Whoever did it was not entirely lacking in competence. Once the clock had been wound, the cells in your eye would have begun manufacturing normal human proteins, cell division following the normal blueprint.’ He sighed. ‘But whoever did it was either sloppy or hasty or both. They reset only a fraction of the clocks, and then imperfectly. There’s a small war going on in your eye, between different components of the Ultra genetics machinery. Whoever tried to reset the clock thought they were turning the machine off, but all they really did was throw a spanner in its works.’ A note of sorrow entered his voice. ‘Such haste. Such dreadful haste. Of course, whoever it was more than deserved to fail. The question is why they thought it was worth doing in the first place.’ His eyes opened in expectation, and I realised he thought I was going to give him an answer.
But I saw no sense in giving him that pleasure, much as I would have liked to. Instead I said, ‘I want a scan. A full-body scan. You can do that, can’t you?’
‘It depends what you want it for; the kind of resolution you want me to achieve.’
‘Nothing too fine. I just want you to look for something. Tissue damage. Internal. Wounds which may or may not have healed.’
‘I can but try,’ the man said, gesturing to the couch, a skatelike scanning device already gliding down from the ceiling.
It did not take very long. In all honesty, I would have been surprised if the Mixmaster scan had revealed anything other than what I was dreading and expecting. It was just a question of seeing it revealed in the cold indices of a readout; just a question of finally burying any residual traces of denial — and, for that matter, hope, which might have remained.
The skate imaged my body core, learning my inner secrets via a manifold of sensory techniques. The machine was really just a highly modified form of trawl, adjusted to cope with the cellular and genetic structure of the whole body, rather than the specialised flavours of neural tissue alone. Given time, it could resolve matter down to the atomic level; right to the border of quantum fuzziness, but there was no need for such precision now, and the scan was commensurately rapid.
And what it showed chilled me to the core. Something which should have been there was missing.
Something which should have been missing was there.
THIRTY-TWO
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Zebra said.
She had forced me to sit down in the atrium and drink something hot and sweet and nondescript.
‘You can’t begin to imagine.’
‘What was so bad, Tanner? It must have been something you were expecting, or you wouldn’t have asked the Mixmaster to give you the scan.’
‘Let’s say fearing, rather than expecting, shall we?’
I didn’t know where or when to begin, or even with whom. Ever since arriving around Yellowstone my memories had been damaged, and I’d had the added complication of the indoctrinal virus to deal with. The virus had given me unwelcome glimpses into the psyche of Sky Haussmann, and yet at the same time aspects of my own past had begun to come back into focus; who I was; what I was doing; why I wanted to kill Reivich. All of those things, disturbing as they’d been, I could have come to terms with. But it hadn’t stopped there. It hadn’t even stopped when I started thinking and feeling my way through Sky’s past; vouchsafed secrets no one else knew about his crimes. Nor had it stopped when I started having confused thoughts about Gitta; remembering her from Cahuella’s viewpoint rather than my own.
Even that I could have begun to rationalise, with some effort. Contamination of my own memories by Cahuella’s? Well, it was possible. Memories could be recorded and transferred, after all. I couldn’t begin to imagine why some of Cahuella’s experiences should have become intermingled with my own, but it wasn’t unthinkable that it had happened.
But the truth — the truth that I was beginning to glimpse — was more disturbing than that.
I wasn’t even wearing the right body.
‘It isn’t easy to explain,’ I said.
Zebra answered in a hiss, ‘People don’t just walk into Mixmaster parlours and ask to be scanned for internal tissue damage — not unless they half expect to find something.’
‘No, I…’ I stopped. Had I imagined it, or had I just seen that face again, near the mingling crowds around Methuselah? Perhaps now I was really hallucinating, pushed over the edge by what the Mixmaster had shown me. Perhaps it was my destiny to see Reivich everywhere I looked now, no matter what the circumstances.
‘Tanner… ?’
I dared not look any deeper into the crowd. ‘There should have been something there,’ I said. ‘A wound which should have been present, but wasn’t. Something which happened to me once. It was healed… but nothing heals that perfectly.’
‘What type of wound?’
‘My memories tell me I lost a foot. I can tell you exactly how it happened; exactly how it felt. But there’s no sign of the injury.’
‘Well, the regrowth procedure must have been very sophisticated. ’
‘What about the other wound, then? A wound the man I was working for sustained at the same time? He took a beam-weapon discharge right through him, Zebra. That showed up.’
‘You’re losing me, Tanner.’ She looked around, her gaze catching on something or someone for an instant before returning to me. ‘Are you trying to tell me you’re not who you think you are?’
