Dark Matter (30 page)

I wondered, and saw the same thought behind
other eyes, why Remus had invited a raver to this meeting, one who had drunk
too deeply from the dweoming well, drowned or dissipated in it. Was it too much
to ask for a sane quorum?

“The premature death of your brother is
lamentable,” said another I knew, Heloise. She had murdered her lover to enter
the ranks of the Imago. No wrinkle of regret marred her timeless skin.

Her voice, creamy as her skin, lifted goose
bumps on my neck. But Heloise took lovers the way most take a fine meal, so
deeply was the pattern of her dweoming stamped.

I snatched my gaze from her.

She continued, “But you must find another.”

I had been right. They demanded the
contest, the killing. But in my case, I knew this standing on ritual was a thin
pretext. They wanted me leashed. Or better yet, dead. Shifters are rare, and
feared. None dared say it, or else my corpse would already have been floating
in the Hudson.

Happily, no one there remembered or, if so,
cared I had desired this very ability. Had they, they might have pried up my
little secret, and the only ritual to involve me then would have been the
coup
de grace
.

“This brother,” I said. “Must he be wild or
cultivated?”

Remus shrugged, magnanimous: “The lore
doesn’t proscribe.” He smiled. “Brother, sister, found, made. It is up to you.”

The Imago claim mystical significance for
the pairing. But, at best, it is an accident of history; at worst, a vetting
mechanism. Every man and woman in that room was guaranteed a murderer. The ties
that knit. It made the strangest congregation the War Chapel has ever seen.

“But if you decline to try,” said Remus,
“you will submit to
patronage
.”

Patronage. Benign word for death-in-life.
The patron, so called, held title deed over the life of the Imago consigned to
him. This relationship was enforced by the collective and incalculable might of
the Imago. One of few cases where that might was united. Violation meant death
to the consignee. And worse, what constituted a violation was
defined
by
the patron. The consignee was effectively in thrall to his patron.

“And who would be my patron?” I said to
Remus. “You?”

His smile grew, drawing his lips taut.

“I would have that honour, yes.”

I shuddered, and cursed myself inwardly.

My eyes darted to the raver who was tracing
an imaginary line on the wall, a loop of spittle arcing between mouth and
shoulder. All ravers were assigned to patrons, without exception, lest they be
walking dynamite among the brute populace. Not that the Imago cared for people.
They cared not to be hassled. This raver, who barked just to hear his echo, was
owned by Remus. One of many under his patronage. No one knew why Remus kept so
many. Rumours swirled that he unpicked them, mind and body, for amusement. But
I suspected he kept them like oysters. For all their froth and grit, they
occasionally turned out a pearl. That is, until they had dived so far within
themselves that their brains ceased to bother with such mundanities as the body’s
autonomic functions of digestion and heart beat.

The sight of the pathetic creature fired my
blood.

I thrust my face forward until it was
inches from Remus, then slowly, deliberately, tilted my head until I could see
the tips of his Oxford Wingtips poking from the cuffs of his pants. I spat.

“You couldn’t keep me, scrawny wolf,” I
whispered into his face.

With a snarl he wrapped an arm behind my
back. His hand took hold of my jacket and with great force he bent me backwards
at the hips. I was caught off guard, finding my balance again, when he thrust
something like a gun into my stomach.

“Maybe not, but the Imago can and will. And
until that time, we’re watching you.”

With a flash of insight I realised it was
not a bullet chambered in the gun. I locked my hand over the hand holding the
gun and, against Remus’s protesting muscles, raised it until I was staring down
the black hole of its aperture. It was rectangular, no wider than the edge of a
coin. A tagging device.

I pulled the trigger.

Pain burst in my eyeball as though I’d
stuck it with a burning brand. Pain that made my whole body clench. But
contrary to my expectation, the eye screamed with light. It went supernova, not
black hole.

When I mastered myself again, I looked out
of my good eye and was delighted to see the shock on Remus’s face.

I heard Heloise breathe, “Such a waste.”
She sounded genuinely disappointed.

Then, summoning the latent power of my
sublimated biology, I commanded the flesh of my eye to expel, to draw blood, to
seal, to scaffold, to knit. To restore that jellied orb.

If possible, this pain was worse.

As the newly minted lens, complete with
corneal cap, surfaced to sit snug in the regenerated tissue, something popped
free. I caught it in my palm and saw the quarter-inch square tag that my healed
eye had extruded.

I held it in Remus’s face and crushed it to
dust.

“You already watch me. I won’t be tagged
like livestock.”

Remus recovered his composure.

“That is an interesting gift,” he said. “I
once knew a man with that gift. Before he died I tested it, organ by organ, by
means chemical, radioactive, and combustive.” He stroked his grizzled jaw,
seemingly lost in reverie. “But I don’t know why I bothered. Each morsel of
flesh came to the same end. Dust and ash.”

I hesitated a moment. I envisaged my fist
crumpling the cartilage and bone of his nose. The fingers of my right hand were
curling into a ball when a hoarse shout rang in the small room.

“Shifter, shaper, flesh-twist-maker!” sang
the raver, eyes aflame, in a mockery of nursery rhyme. “Seed sown well and grew
a faker! The Eye it sees—” and he broke off and turned back to inscribe his
invisible fancies on the wall.

But he’d lifted the hairs on my neck. Like
I said: the occasional pearl. It was time to leave.

I turned to Heloise and, avoiding her fey
gaze, said, “I will find a brother then, in the wild.”

The hunt for a naturally-occurring Imago
might give me the time and scope to find a way to be rid of the Imago for good.

We dispersed, dust into the air, to homes
all over the world, and many in Europe. The Old World felt most like home to
these men and woman who had lived such long lives.

But I headed for Hong Kong, for that was
where Clotho—who found
me
—would
supply the resources I humbly requested.

On route, somewhere thirty thousand feet
above baking Arabian sands, I pondered a riddle: what threat can one hold over
those without care for money, power, or experience—who possess it already in
super-abundance? The Imago, united by nothing save what they
are
. What
lever would pry them from my back forever?

In Hong Kong I learned the true extent of
the web of information crisscrossing the Internet. Clotho taught me. He showed
me the trapdoors and swinging bookcases that led to the hidden web, the Dark
Web, where whole economies flourish that will not come into the light for fear
of shame or retribution. He taught me how to tap it. I learned, and adapted.
That is what I do. I sifted the hay and found my needle. ...and here I am.

The last thing I did before leaving Hong
Kong for Perth, Australia, was to transfer my liquid funds into HK Shanghai
Bank. I swapped my Swiss account and password for the lumpen touch of an
authenticating
chop
, the Asian equivalent of a signature—a seal, carved
from wood, signifying its possessor is entitled to draw on my funds. My chop
was carved in the shape of Infinity. The swap was a precaution. Clotho had
taught me not to trust to digital codes in the aether. And, truth to tell, the
feel of the chop’s grain transports me to another time. Perhaps I too am of the
Old World.

PAST RUIN

The night sky is a double illusion.

Powerful telescopes pointed at the tiniest
wedge of sky—any wedge—find it filled with galaxies of stars in the billions.
If the naked eye could see so well, night would be not a star-speckled void,
but a sheet of light. Day would be the darker half.

To count every star in the known universe
at one second a star would take a quadrillion lifetimes stretched end to end.
More time than has elapsed since the Beginning, since dumb matter shrugged dumb
shoulders and slewed off worlds and life, or the hammer of God’s voice fell
upon the anvil of His will.

The night sky is a
double
illusion
because, of the few stars visible to the naked eye, many are long dead. The
light striking our retina is old and stale, every photon a letter from a dead
friend.

Rasputin was hunkered down in the angle
made by a bookshelf and a window, in the nook that served him and Jordy for a
library. It was the first day to top 30 degrees Celsius since the previous
summer, and he could feel the sun’s rays warming the curtains. He was soothed
by the dark quietude.

“The universe is bathed in orphaned
photons,” he said to no one.

Flakes of gold glimmered in the periphery
of his vision from the bookshelf. They were trapped in a souvenir flask, but
Rasputin’s brain informed him that these too had been born in the sun’s
colossal nuclear furnace.

His hands held a copy of Pride and
Prejudice, taken from the same shelf on which the gold sat. It was closed. He
knew the book’s publisher,
Red Saturn
, without having to flip it over,
something he had in common, unaccountably, with
Rasputin-from-before-the-accident. His eyes rested on the dark bar the book’s
removal had left in the shelf.

He scanned the shelf, then those below. He
had read most of the books. The millions of words they contained hovered in
clusters beneath the surface of his vision. He could summon any or all into
sight at will. (How long would it take him to read each word?) The only black
holes in the textscape came from books he had not read, such as Jordy’s manga
and computing texts.

In the weeks since his showdown with
Thorpe, the ability to merge his inner vision with everyday life had exploded.
But the pull of that inner world had grown too. He had spent whole days within,
in the eye’s quiet harbour. He would play games with its machines and ransack
his memories, emerging only to visit the toilet, and eat. His appetite had
doubled. Sometimes, if feeling brave, he would search for warps in the fabric
of its sky, for telltale signs of activity.

He toyed with the idea of writing an
autobiography. Andy Warhol had made a movie of a man sleeping for eight hours;
Rasputin could more than one-up that. Every memory since childhood lay within
his reach. Even those from the very first years, he suspected, were coming
beneath the eye’s aegis, its silver feelers tireless in their work of
cataloguing, associating, and connecting every sense-bundle he had ever recorded.

That growth was why, when bored of playing
games and rediscovering forgotten experiences, he went fishing for the memory
of his sister. It was slowly, but undeniably, becoming crisper, fresher.

All of this convinced him Thorpe was wrong.
He was no Sudden Savant. He had researched Savantism with a fury, and found it
fascinating―the lives lived under its blessing or curse read like fiction. One
boy, following an hour-long helicopter flight, had sketched vast swathes of
London, complete with pillar boxes and fountains: a super-human memory and the
muscle control to transcribe it to paper. A man Rasputin read about could
perform mental arithmetic to arbitrary decimal places, and, most interestingly,
was able to describe the mental contortions he performed to do the math. He
described his mind as being like a fantastic landscape ruled by numbers, where
every digit had a peculiar shape and feel, and each calculation was a journey
through that land. The answer lay inerrantly like a pot of gold at journey’s
end.

But no case bore more than passing
resemblance to his condition.

His search had widened perforce, due to the
rarity of true savants. He had stumbled across a most interesting case in a
neurobiology textbook. It described a man able to control, by force of will,
autonomic functions of his body. He could raise his heartbeat by imagining
running, dilate his pupils by thinking about a dark room, and lower his
temperature by picturing himself in a blizzard. Yet more bizarre, he could turn
off the sensation of pain, take the agony of a burn―that most acute and
insistent pain―wrap it in cloth and sequester it in the attic of his brain,
just another possession, devoid of the power to hurt. Rasputin had wondered if
the man could do the same with grief.

But as amazing as this catalogue of
abilities was, it did not square with his experience. Yes, the accident had
gifted him an immaculate memory, a memory so organically connected to his
nervous system he could effortlessly translate it to paper. His sub-conscious
could perform calculations that took computers dedicated to the task hours. But
unlike a Savant’s gift, which is fixed, his was an ever-renewing forest. Who
knew what timber was yet to thrust through the canopy into the light, and what
creatures were still to crawl from hidden places in the sylvan gloom beneath.