Dark Matter (25 page)

Thorpe drew near in the silence that
followed, and the room shrank to the space between them.

“Yes, there is. But it will take more than
satellites.”

Rasputin did not have to turn to see the
dark heart of Africa. It was mirrored in Thorpe’s pupils.

“We need a landing party. We need the
spirit of the explorers who trod the ground to open the great frontiers. We
need to get beneath this globe of bone so vital for life, yet so resistant to
understanding of that same life, to the treasure held in its bony protuberances.”

Thorpe leaned away, as if sensing the mood
that had fallen over them like a leaden shroud.

“We’re very near the heart of my calling
now. You understand I am a rare bird, Rasputin: neuroscientist, neurologist.
But the best description is the one I’ve alluded to: explorer.” He reached into
a drawer and placed an object over the drawing of the brain. “And this is the
landing vessel.”

His hand withdrew to reveal what at first
glance appeared to be a bullet. It had the dull, clean shine of all instruments
at the business end of clinical medicine. At Thorpe’s invitation, Rasputin
picked it up. Its weight and tubular shape were very like a bullet casing, but
complications at its butt pointed to a different purpose. Rasputin raised the
rear of the device to his eye and tried to decipher the meaning of the small,
regularly spaced holes.

“They look
almost like—”

“Terminals, yes,” finished Thorpe. “That is
an electrode. Its purpose is to apply electrical stimulation directly into the
cerebral cortex.” He arched an eyebrow. “But similar devices have been in use
for decades. To see what is novel about this particular specimen, you need to
examine the other end.”

Rasputin did so and, at first, saw only the
terminus of the electrode.

“I see a curling wand for the sticky side
of your skull, but—” he began, then noticed the head of the electrode was not a
simple point. From it bristled a tuft of impossibly thin wires. It sent a
shudder wriggling down his neck and over his shoulders. “So it curls
and
buffs?”

“Those wires are a micro-array of
electrodes. Each wire is only 50 nanometres thick. Small enough to read the
electrical impulses fired by a single neuron.”

Rasputin became conscious, for the first
time during their interview, of Thorpe’s breathing.

“This electrode is to neurology what the
microscope was to biology.”

“Did you invent it?”

“No. Electrodes capable of reading at cell
resolution have been in existence for some time now.”

“Why the excitement then?”

“There’s a rub, you see. Applying
electrical stimulation to the brain is a long-accepted treatment for certain
neurological disorders. But
reading
electrical charge has no immediate
clinical benefit. The ethical watchdogs will maul anyone inserting an electrode
for merely experimental purposes. The beauty of this device—”

“Is to smuggle one in with the other.”
Rasputin’s gaze was fastened to the tiny star-burst of wires.

“
Smuggle
is a rather negative term,
but you have put your finger on it. This device delivers aid to stricken
Egyptian villages, while allowing the mission to search for the source of the
Nile; a patient’s need for therapy becomes the researcher’s opportunity to
advance science. And you can see now why neurology must leave the lab and take
a machete to the jungles—why I call myself, above all, an explorer.”

Rasputin’s phone belched. Annoyance rippled
his brow as he pulled it free and glanced at the screen. It heralded a new
message. He called it up, conscious of Thorpe’s gaze. The message was from Sam,
no surprise there.

It read:
Thorpes bro. U o me a case now
.
It was followed by an address.

He crammed the phone back into his pocket
and met Thorpe’s gaze.

“I have to be somewhere, sorry.”

“Remember what I’ve said. If we are to
unravel this knot,” said Thorpe, threading his fingers again for emphasis, “we
need a pioneering spirit.”

“I will,” said Rasputin as he rose, and let
himself out.

As he rode the elevator down, the word
knot
rolled like a marble around his mind. It occurred to him then that Thorpe
shared his first name with another who had been interested in knots. The
association was not encouraging.

Outside, standing in the spill of afternoon
sunlight, he recalled the address in Sam’s message. Thorpe’s brother lived in
Shenton Park, a suburb that bordered the university.

He dug a coin from his pocket, a twenty-cent
piece.

“Tails I go home. Heads I hunt the
Jabberwocky.”

He flipped the coin. It bounced out of his
palm and rang on the concrete. He stooped to retrieve it.
Tails.

He decided to pay a visit anyway. Thorpe
needed some family to fix him in the tissue of human society. Beyond that,
spontaneity was fast becoming a virtue for Rasputin. He began walking, and
wondered briefly if he ought to examine that trait, but the thought was soon
banished from his mind. Bars of sunlight were falling through the tree canopy
as if in cloud burst, causing the chosen few of leaf and flower to burn in the
arboreal gloom. The earth under foot smelt rich with moisture.

He left the campus via the same tunnel he
had taken the day Sam appeared on his radar. An irrational fear of the then
unknown stalker closed over him momentarily. He fought the emotion to reconcile
it with his knowledge of Sam, the ASIO agent tasked with monitoring his
movements, but his mind clung to the first impression as though that dark man
was real, possessed of independent life.

It was not the first time he had felt this
fracture in reality, a bifurcation of first impression and subsequent
familiarity.

Jordy—the Jordy he knew—was a far cry from
the creature Dee had introduced years before. Clinging to Rasputin’s memory of
that party was the smell of pot. The music had been loud, stripping all
subtlety from conversation. And that Jordy’s eyes had crawled over every dress
in the room. Later, Dee had pleaded his case: he had lost a long-time friend to
a brain tumour. Her judgment of his character had been vindicated by time, but
it had not erased that first impression.

The wash of traffic noise receded as he got
away from the highway and into suburban streets. It was an expensive postcode,
but the houses were modest. The homes he passed were clad in brick and
corrugated iron rooves of subdued, earthy tones, quiet beneath the drooping
branches of peppermint trees, and presiding over niche courtyards and neat
patches of lawn. Each garden had a unity imposed by an economy of space not
money—
laissez-faire
English cottage gardens, Japanese pebble features,
and Australian natives biopsied from the Bush. But over the pastiche, the peppermints
asserted their aura, which for Rasputin was of summer holidays, salt, sand and
flies. This was as
old money
as Perth got, a contrast to the
nouveau
riche
mansions on the riverfront, which puffed out their chests to
challenge the view rather than steep in it.

He had been walking for half an hour when
his leg began to murmur with pain. He knew the precise location of the street
he was after, but had underestimated the distance—that is, the distance on
foot. When it came to learning to take account of the limits his leg imposed on
him, he was proving a slow learner.

Two things about the house he found at the
address struck him as peculiar. It rambled backwards over a double block, and
it was gated. He might have turned around then and there if his leg hadn’t
screamed blue murder.

He approached the intercom and pressed the
hail button. A woman’s voice answered immediately. “Walsham’s. Yes please?”

Walsham’s?
That wasn’t right. He wanted Thorpe’s.

What the hell.

“Joachim Thorpe. I’m here to see Joachim
Thorpe.”

A pause.

“The nature of the visit?”

“I’m a friend.” Was that half true? What
was the enemy of an enemy?

“Your name, please?”

“Lowdermilk. Rasputin Lowdermilk. I’m a
friend of Alexander. A family friend, really.” He grimaced as he said it.

Another pause.

“Come through,” she said, and a metallic
snap reverberated through the grillwork of the gate as it was remotely
unlocked.

He passed through the gate and descended a
short flight of stairs to the front door. He opened it, entered and found
himself in what appeared to be a small foyer, complete with counter. Behind it
was seated a woman, presumably the one with whom he had spoken. She
acknowledged his presence with a weighted glance before returning her attention
to a computer screen.

He scanned the room.

“Do you need help locating Mr. Thorpe?”

“No, no. I’ve been before.”

“I have no record of you having visited,”
she said, searching records that rippled upwards over the computer’s screen.

Then why, he thought, didn’t you just tell
me where he is. You are tricksy. He said, “Perhaps they got my name wrong. It
happens a lot,” and sidled closer to the counter to absorb the records flowing
over the screen.

“Never mind,” he said, and wandered into a
corridor that appeared to be the thoroughfare out of the lobby.

The place was a puzzle that his mind worked
furiously to fit together before someone realised he was not meant to be there—and
of that he was sure.

The foyer had been furnished with expensive
but discreet taste. There was no sign of ‘Walsham’s’ anything, nor any other
markers identifying its purpose. The building was gated to keep riff raff out,
but exactly what kind of riff raff?

The clues began to gel as a familiar smell
tickled his nose. The perfume of industrial strength cleaner wafted under his
nose, the kind that killed germs and blanketed the odour of urine and worse, and
at that moment a door in the corridor opened to admit a woman wearing nurses’
whites.

“How is Joachim?” he said on impulse.

His question startled the nurse, and he
wondered if she was used to being addressed. She replied, apologetically, in
English buried beneath a heavy European accent, “Oh. Mr. Thorpe. He is three
doors down.” She pointed the way.

Upon entering the dim room, the first thing
Rasputin noticed was the noise—a scraping, juddering that became thick with
liquid noises and then aspirated with indrawn air. Was someone perking coffee
in a self-contained espresso machine? But he saw his error immediately, before
the machine cycled from silence to grind again. The rhythmic sound was coming
from a life support device connected by wires and intubation to a man lying on
a bed.

Only the man’s head and shoulders were
visible above a linen sheet. He was of colossal height. His legs overhung the
end of the long bed. But the sheet clung to his form in valleys and peaks that
gave it the look of a death shroud covering a skeleton. Converging on the man’s
face were support lines from the machine, but enough of his pale, sunken flesh,
which sat upon his bones as the sheet sat upon his frame, was visible for
Rasputin to know beyond doubt that this man was Thorpe’s brother.

Rasputin pulled a chair up to the bed’s
side and sat facing Joachim Thorpe. He tried to decipher the meaning of what
was in front of him, his thoughts beginning in a number of false starts, like
fire taking to loose tinder. But each flared only to find it had consumed the
evidence, and starved and died as quickly as it had begun.

The room was luxuriously appointed and
carefully tended. What light there was slanted through a gap in the heavy
curtains. It fell in a bar across the carpet and then over Joachim’s midriff.
Fresh flowers were bursting from vases placed on space-filling furnishings and
a mantel that ran parallel to the bed’s foot. Between them nestled numerous
photo frames, too dark to make out from where he sat. Even the door standing ajar
on the opposite side of the bed, revealing a disabled-ready shower and toilet,
was of thick and expensive-looking hardwood. A cigarette tray on a bedside
table was the only item out of place. A sprinkle of ash sat in its rim like
salt and pepper, and he fancied he could smell smoke lingering in the air.

What ambience the room might have had was
crushed by the machine’s unceasing rasp. And
that
smell.

He mused aloud. “What is this place,
Joachim? And what are you doing here?”

He rose and crossed to the mantle forested
with flowers. Their blooms cast shadows over the photos beneath, which could
have been headstones nestled in undergrowth. He leaned closer to better look at
them. Figuring in most was a younger, much healthier looking Joachim. The
second most popular subject was a woman with a strong resemblance to both
brothers, their mother. Alexander appeared in one photo, back bent, skin
glistening with sun-struck moisture, hauling a catamaran from what looked to be
Crawley Bay near the university. In the foreground was Joachim, laughing at
someone out of frame. Both men were near 30 perhaps, and Joachim had then had a
physique to match his brother’s.