‘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 therapies 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?’
‘Not immediately, no. It doesn’t help that the sequences are fragmentary in most chains. The specific DNA changes are normally inserted by a retrovirus, one which would be engineered by us — or bloodcutters — and programmed to effect the right mutations for the desired transformation. In your case,’ he continued, ‘the virus doesn’t seem to have copied itself very efficiently. There are very few intact strands where the changes are expressed fully. It’s inefficient, and it might explain why the changes haven’t begun to affect the gross structure of your eye. But it’s also nothing I’ve seen before. If this is really bloodcutter work, it might mean that they’re using techniques we don’t know anything about.’
‘This isn’t good, is it?’
‘At least when they stole their techniques from us, there was some guarantee they’d work, or wouldn’t be actively dangerous.’ He shrugged. ‘Now, I’m afraid, there’s no such guarantee. I imagine you’re already beginning to regret that visit. But it’s rather too late for regrets.’ ‘Thanks for your sympathy. I presume if you can map these changes, you can also undo them?’ ‘That’ll be much harder than making them in the first place. But it could be done, at a cost.’ ‘You don’t surprise me.’ ‘Will you be requiring our services, then?’
I moved towards the door, letting Chanterelle walk ahead of me. ‘I’ll be sure to let you know, believe me.’
I was unsure how she expected me to act after the examination, whether she imagined that the Mixmaster’s enquiries would jog my memory, and that I would suddenly realise just what it was that was wrong with my eyes and how they had ended up like that? Maybe she had. And — just maybe — so had I, clinging to the idea that the nature of my eyes was something I had temporarily forgotten, a long-delayed aspect of the revival amnesia.
But nothing like that happened.
I was none the wiser, but even more unsettled, because I knew that something was really happening, and I could no longer dismiss how my eyes seemed to glow in my face. There had to be more to it than that. Since arriving in Chasm City, I had been growing steadily more aware of a faculty I had never known before: I could see in the dark, when other people needed image-intensifying goggles or infra-red overlays. I had noticed it for the first time — without really consciously recognising it — when I had entered the ruined building and looked upwards to see the staircase which had led me to safety, and to Zebra. There should not have been enough light for me to see what I had seen, but of course I had more than my share of other things to worry about. Later, after the cable-car had crashed into Lorant’s kitchen, the same thing had happened. I had crawled from the wrecked vehicle and seen the pig and his wife long before they saw me — even though I was the only one not looking through night-goggles. And again, too doped on adrenalin to reflect on the matter, I’d let it pass, although by then it was not quite so easy to put out of mind.