Dark Matter (24 page)

He got neither. The thing simply hung in
space, rippling occasionally with a telltale glint.

“What is it?” he said at last.

From somewhere someone spoke, “Manna.”

A moment later he recognised the word was
spoken with his own voice. It wasn’t an answer, merely an echo of his question
in Hebrew.

He tried again: “Show me what this is.”

In response, a faint glow began to radiate
from the eye itself, as if it were a submariner firing lamps on the deep ocean
floor.

The light struck the thing and revealed its
curves. He saw now that it was puckered along one side. A seam ran down it like
a tipped smile.

He pointed at the flaw: “Go there.”

The horizon swung to bring the seam centre.
The eye moved forward. The seam stretched at once, each end disappearing out of
view above and below. The smile widened. But would it widen enough for the eye
to fit?

He was about to find out.

Feeling a mild pressure on his eardrums, he
crossed the threshold and was swallowed by the smile.

His first thought on reaching the other
side was of finding an air bubble in a pot of ink. But what set his skin
tingling was that the bubble appeared to be larger than the bottle. He had
entered a wardrobe only to find it a portal to a snow-bound world. He had
slipped into a fold in space.

Walls of deep black arched above and below,
and colours like oil upon water swirled over them and strobed their surfaces
like searchlights. As far as Rasputin could see, spires the size of
planet-axles punctured the walls, thrusting inward. The place looked like an
inside-out sea urchin.

The spires all converged on an object that
he could not recognise. A riot of light was riding each spire to clash and
coruscate around the object, so intense it baffled his view.

Shielding his eyes, he willed himself
toward it.

As the distance shrank he began to pick out
details of the object amid the flashing brilliance. But they were little help.
The thing resembled the skeleton of a skyscraper fallen to its side. But its
girders had an
organic
look—they were tangled and restless.

His gaze travelled along one such elastic
girder, until it tripped, and stopped, rooted to a point.

He blinked, and stared. There, dwarfed by
the scale of the object but unmistakable, was the likeness of a man.

As if Rasputin’s gaze had announced his
presence to the man, he rose from a crouch, turned, and stared up at the eye.
An instant later he stood before Rasputin.

Blood drained from Rasputin’s cheeks.

The man stood still, staring at Rasputin in
frank appraisal.

Rasputin made his own inspection: the man
appeared the purest stereotype of the mad inventor, with pinched brows couching
eyes that shone with the lustre of cut sapphire. Unnervingly, his fly-away hair
seem to wriggle like the girders of the thing outside.

When he spoke, his voice sounded borrowed
from the forensic artist, Bert Hills. It rumbled as though some mechanism of
his voice box had worn bearings.

“Mary had a little lamb,” said the
inventor, “and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb went
if so inclined?
”

Rasputin smiled despite himself.

Ambient colour stained the inventor’s white
coat. He thrust his hands deep into its pockets.

“You’re far from home, little lamb,” he
said, and Rasputin felt he was being weighed in the man’s gaze.

“Who are you?” said Rasputin.

He gave no response. Colour continued to
moil over his coat, but strangely not his face. If anything, that looked paler.

Rasputin changed tack. He turned and looked
out on the colossal super-structure. It reminded him of the bamboo scaffolding
that sheathed buildings in Asia, only this was in the grip of a hurricane.

“What is that?” He barked, suddenly carried
on a sense of proprietaryness. After all, it was
his
mind. Wasn’t it?

The inventor followed his gaze. His face
lit with a smile. The wriggle of purple veins beneath his temples showed
through his now translucent skin.

“A beginning.”

“Of what?”

“The greatest construction ever made.”

“But what are you building?” Rasputin said,
riding a wave of indignation that died when he looked again at the man.

His coat had turned black, and its cut had
thinned and lowered. His hair, which had not stopped moving since he had
appeared, was now curling in on itself, tightening and drooping down either
side of his face to rest on his shoulders. His face began positively to shine
until Rasputin was forced to squint.

The man’s expression was unreadable beneath
the strengthening glow as he said: “I am building a case.”

Rasputin saw at last that the inventor had
become a judge.

When the judge spoke his voice seemed to
come from his feet.

“But you are not ready to be here yet.”

He swept a hand toward Rasputin. The
gesture picked him up, picked the eye up, and thrust them backwards, across the
cavern, and through the lip of the fold in space. The gap closed and was gone.

The part of Rasputin that might have asked
if this was a dream had long since fallen asleep.

***

With the blinds drawn up, Thorpe’s
room looked less like the den of a Mediaeval collector of antiquities, but only
a little less.

For an hour they had been talking, or
rather, Thorpe had been trying to dredge up the history of Rasputin’s family
life, and Rasputin had been fending off the probes, and telling half-truths.

Rasputin felt stiff from tension. He was
sunk so deep into the leather of his chair he fancied, were he to rise, his
buttocks would produce a double-beat syncopated sucking noise.

Thorpe had been genial throughout, but
Rasputin guessed he was frustrated. Their conversation had been a play-act. Both
knew it, neither was admitting it.

Now Thorpe was simply watching Rasputin.
Finally, he sighed, as if coming to a resolution.

“Can I get you a drink?” said Thorpe.

Rasputin recalled the pleasant warmth and
looseness Guinness had worked in him at the casino. He nodded.

Thorpe rose and turned to the sideboard
behind his desk. He poured an amber liquid into a tumbler and passed it to
Rasputin.

“Top shelf, or so I’m told.”

“You not having one?”

“Can’t stand the stuff.”

Rasputin sipped at the liquor, and felt its
warm length slide inside him snake-like. It sought his stomach, and when it
fell there radiated warmth outwards. He imagined tension evaporating, and
thought, after all, he might leave his chair without acoustic accompaniment.

“You’re the first professor to give me
grog.”

“Brain cells are my specialty—healing and
killing.”

Rasputin was beginning to get Thorpe’s
humour, and its lack of conventional markers.

He took another sip. His chest hitched on
the verge of a cough. He waited it out, then said: “So, am I depressed?”

“You are raising an alarming number of
flags, including signs of depression.”

Flags, signs, constellations.
Wasn’t this supposed to be science? It sounded more like gizzard
reading and tea-leaf augury. He yearned for a definitive pronouncement. He
wanted facts or figures that put him on a trajectory that someone had trod
before, which gave shape to his future, which offered even a little hope to
dispel the dark, suffocating cloud that thickened every day.

“Can’t you scan me or something?” There was
a hint of hysteria in his voice. “I know you said cell damage can be
undetectable, but surely
something
will show up?”

 
“Have you ever held a baby?” Thorpe said.

Rasputin, now used to Thorpe’s segues,
answered promptly. “No. Never.”

“Fantastic creatures.” He pointed his
finger at Rasputin. “Just after you were born, lying in your mother’s arms,
still smeared in birth-white, possibly dribbling, probably crying, and uglier
than a puppy, your brain was already a more complex and powerful machine than
any endeavour of man, in all the marches of civilisation, has ever produced: a
bloody, needy, baffling miracle—if I may use such a quaint term. Look beneath
the surface of that wrinkly little pate and you, were you able, would see a
brain building 250,000 new cells every
minute
. A biological big bang
less understood than its cosmological cousin.”

Thorpe had rested his hand again on the
table as he spoke and his attention turned inward, but his gaze snapped back to
Rasputin as he fired questions at him.

“Why did those cells reach out 100 arms to
their neighbours? Why did they gradually shrink from that contact as you grew
into a man, until only five remained? Why did those that remain fight to exist,
and why did they win? And how did they find their way in the first place,
through the primordial sea of Rasputin, through tangles of other beginning,
growing, organising cellular matter.”

Thorpe flicked his hand at Rasputin’s foot
which had perched unremarked on a corner of the desk after he had begun to
drink.

“I know you curse your leg at the moment,
but isn’t it a marvel that a single cell extrusion, the longest nerve in the
human body, reaches over a meter from the base of your spine to your big toe: a
single cell that carries the pain message of a stubbed toe all the way up your
leg to hand it off to your spinal cord.”

Rasputin suppressed an urge to squirm.

Thorpe leant forward on his elbows, and his
fingers interdigitated. “Your brain is knit together like all the world’s
highways a million times over according to the blueprint of a mad genius poet.”

He stood and reached above his head for a
heavy-looking book. He flipped it open, placed it on the desk, and rotated it
the right way up for Rasputin. The open pages depicted the brain, littered with
overlaid labels and text describing its features. While Rasputin examined it,
Thorpe rose and navigated to a massive world globe set in an intricate metal
stand. Rasputin glanced up and saw Europe in miniature, dotted with towns and
lined with rivers.

“Students open that textbook, see that
figure or others like it, and think
Europe:
mapped, travelled, and,
barring the details, understood.”

Thorpe spun the globe and stabbed his
finger down, halting it.

“Not so.”

Rasputin squinted to see what Thorpe had
fingered. It was Africa, but there was something wrong with it. He knew
immediately that its shape was askew in places—the eye could show him precisely
where it varied against every map of Africa he had ever seen. But what drew his
attention was its dark centre. The heart of Africa was a shaded apology, an
embarrassing stain of ignorance, compared to the complete picture of Europe and
the dominion of which it spoke. Hedgerow versus vine-tangle.

“There lies the brain,” said Thorpe, and
spun the globe idly as he walked back to his seat.

Something buzzed in Rasputin’s pocket and
he nearly leapt from his chair in fright. He retrieved his phone and saw an
incoming call from Sam. He killed the call and replaced the phone.

“So, in answer to your question,” said
Thorpe, “can’t I just scan you or something: no. The cutting edge of brain
scanning technology is not unlike a satellite floating thousands of kilometres
above Africa. From its images you can see how much of the Congo has been eaten
by desert, and whether the Nile is in flood, but not where the Ebola virus is
reaping its bloody harvest.”

Rasputin’s searched the cross-sectioned
brain lying open on the desk before him. The page contained fifty-seven
features that were named, many of which had accompanying descriptive text. He
desperately wanted to believe in Europe.

Thorpe’s eyes twinkled, and there was a
smile in his voice.

“You don’t believe me. Look here,” he said,
and pointed to the illustrated brain. “Do you see this feature?
Nucleus
reticularis tegmenti pontis Bechterewi.
Impressively long, isn’t it
.
But
I prefer these.” He pointed out a series of features, naming each as his finger
rested on it. “
Substantia Innominata
: Unnameable substance;
Nucleus
ambiguus
: Translates itself;
Zone incerta
: Uncertain area.” His
voice rose the further he went, until at last it bubbled over into laughter.
“But, my dear boy, the entire brain is
Zone incerta
. And as long as we
continue to approach it the same way, that is what it will remain.
Scientifically named, but no closer to yielding the mysteries of the
philosopher’s fire within.

“Let us instead simply call it,
Par
Inust
: the Burning Within.”

Something deep in Rasputin cracked under
the pressure of his words. His mind wailed, a plea that escaped in whisper:
“Isn’t there an answer for me?”