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 élite, 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 bottleneck 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 self-supporting 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 ar
tificial 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 t
herapies 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?’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 116