‘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 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 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.