“I guess,” I said, finishing the watery tea with no great enthusiasm, “it will have to remain one of life’s little mysteries.”
“What kind of an answer is that?”
“The best I’m capable of giving at this moment in time. And if that sounds like the kind of thing someone who was a little scared of what the truth might hold might say, maybe you’re not entirely wrong.” I reached under the coat and scratched my chest, my skin itching beneath the sweat-sodden Mendicant clothes. “I’d rather drop the subject for now.”
“Sorry I raised it,” Chanterelle said, heavy with irony. “Well, what happens now, Tanner? You’ve already told me you were surprised that I came back. That suggests to me that my presence isn’t vital to you, or you’d have done something about it. Does it mean we go our separate ways now?”
“You almost sound disappointed.” I wondered if Chanterelle was aware that my hand had not been on the hilt of the gun for several minutes now, and that the weapon had barely entered my thoughts during that time. “Am I that fascinating to you, or are you just more bored than I imagined?”
“A bit of both, probably. But you are fascinating, Tanner. Worse than that, you’re a puzzle I’ve only half solved.”
“Half already? You’d better slow down. I’m not as unfathomable as you think. Scratch the surface and you might be surprised at how little lies beneath. I’m just—”
What was I going to tell her—just a soldier, just a man keeping his word? Just a fool who did not even know when it was time to break it?
I stood up, conspicuously removing my hand from the gun pocket. “I could use your help, Chanterelle, that’s all. But there’s not much more to me than meets the eye. If you want to show me something of this place, I’d be grateful. But you can walk away now.”
“Do you have any money, Tanner?”
“A little. Nothing that would amount to much here, I’m afraid.”
“Show me what you have.”
I pulled out a fistful of greasy Ferris notes, laying them in their sad entirety on the table. “What does that buy me, another cup of tea if I’m lucky?”
“I don’t know. It’s enough to buy you another set of clothes, which I think you could use if you want to blend in at least approximately.”
“Do I look that out of place?”
“You look so out of place, Tanner, you might be in serious danger of starting a fashion. But somehow I don’t think that’s quite what you had in mind.”
“Not really, no.”
“I don’t know Escher Heights well enough to recommend the best, but I saw some boutiques on the way in which we should be able to outfit you.”
“I’d like to look at that tank first, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, I know what that is. That’s Methuselah. I’d forgotten they kept him here.”
I knew the name, vaguely, and I had the impression it had already been half-remembered once this evening. But Chanterelle was leading me away. “We can come back later, when you don’t stand out so much.”
I sighed and put up my hands in surrender. “You can show me the rest of Escher Heights as well.”
“Why not. The night’s still young, after all.”
Chanterelle made some calls while we walked to a nearby boutique, chasing up her friends and establishing that they were all alive and safe in the Canopy, but she did not leave a message for any of them, and then never mentioned them again. That, I supposed, was how it went: many of the people I saw in Escher Heights would be cognisant of the Game, and might even follow it avidly, but none would admit it to themselves, beyond the private parlours where the sport’s existence was acknowledged and celebrated.
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 elite, 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 bottle-neck 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 donat
ed 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 selfsupporting 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 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 seedcarrying 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 ashgrey, 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 behin
d 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.”
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