Dark Matter (32 page)

(
Screaming. Is there a worse sound?
)

Dee was still speaking, but he was watching
her face. So animated. One minute she was pleading, then her brows drew down in
determination.

He spoke, finally, and she froze. He needed
to give her a job, something to take her mind from the discovery that her
oldest friend had taken a life. He said, “Would you help me?”

“Anything, Monk.”

“I need to find the source of my gift,” he
said, holding her gaze. “I don’t want it anymore.”

She was still a moment, then shook her
head, not in response to his question, but as if to shake off an irrelevant
thought.

“Oh, that. Yes, of course.” She twisted to
retrieve her bag. “I’ve been thinking about that too.” She pulled out a diary
and flipped to its last page. She tore it out. It came free from the spiral
spine with a rattle. She handed it to him. On it was a phone number, and what
looked like hours and a building number.

“What’s this?”

“An old lecturer of mine, Professor”—Rasputin
suppressed a shudder as the word passed into his ears—“De Groot. He lectures in
biology, but researches biomarkers for neurological disease. At least, he used
to. I think he’s in semi-retirement. Give him a call.”

He forced a smile, out of respect for Dee’s
concern, folded the paper and stowed it in a pocket.

“Sure.”

“More importantly, he’s a nice guy. He
helped me out no end in my honours year.”

Her brow furrowed in concentration. “Monk,”
she said, drawing his gaze. “Promise me you’re not going to load yourself up
with guilt for what you think happened.”

“Guilt? I was three. I hardly knew the
girl.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

Dee gathered up her things, hugged him, and
let herself out.

He went to bed in his clothes. He searched
for the memory of a U2 concert, and dragged it like bedclothes over his head.
Soon he was standing by Jordy in the pit below the stage. He picked through the
band’s set until he found
Fly on the Wall
and set it to loop, loud. He
sank into smothering, flashing darkness, the bump of strangers, and the
overpowering smell of sweat.

At 2:55AM his phone, lying on his
bedside table, buzzed. The sound reverberated on the wood, magnifying it. It
woke him, not from sleep—his mind was just beginning to wander in valleys that
led there. His hand shot out into the night-gloom, groping. It missed the mark
once, rapping the table, then found the phone.

He switched it on and tiny letters
appeared, blazing with an intensity heightened by the darkness. It said: You
have 1 new message(s).

Leave it, he thought. Then called it up.

Different words burned in the dark: Murder?
Food for the soul. Builds character.

Fear licked the nape of his neck.

He replied, in a fury fuelled by his
fumbling, too-big fingers: Who r u.

When his reply was confirmed sent, he threw
the phone into the darkness. He heard it strike the wall and fall in at least
two pieces.

***

Rasputin’s footfalls echoed in the foyer
of the biology building. He faced the far end of the tiled room, which
contained two doors. One was propped open, and through it came a voice. He
could not discern what it was saying, but it rose and fell with the cadence of
a lecture.

He turned, approached a board of photos of
the biology faculty, and scanned the rows of dour men and women. He imagined
how the photo shoot had gone: “Face the camera. Now imagine you’ve been
diagnosed with cancer—SNAP!”

He was deciding on the best way to tell
Dee, “Thanks but no thanks,”—
academics don’t mix well with my personal life—
when
his gaze was hooked by a photo in the bottom row. It held a man whose hair was
swept back from the camera as if by the flash, in a style Rasputin coined on
the spot,
hedgehog-attempts-land-speed-record
. But his expression was
warm. His eyes were engaged, as though the exposure had interrupted a lively
conversation.

Rasputin knew without reading the nameplate
that here was Dee’s Professor De Groot.

He trained his ears on the vocal rumbling escaping
the lecture theatre. Twice it was drowned by a noise that finally resolved into
the sound of many people laughing.

He crossed to the propped open door, his
shoes clapping on tiles, and snuck into a seat at the rear of the theatre. He
made it just as the last peals of laughter were dying away.

A student two rows below Rasputin raised
his arm. The professor took the question: “What’s the point of polymerase? Why
the fuss? The cell simply has to copy the protein sequence, right?”

Rasputin shifted his attention to the
information on the large screen behind the professor. It broke every rule of
presentation. In place of succinct assertions, was something like a mediaeval
illuminated manuscript penned in crabbed handwriting. The sea of text was
relieved by a chain of circular islands connected by lines. This island-chain
wormed downward, doubling back at the screen’s edge a number of times. He
guessed the diagram was an example of the slide’s eponymous
Protein
Sequences
.

The professor cleared his throat. “You are
wondering,
mijn jonge,
about the need for complex error-correcting
facilities of the cell, of every cell? Why does the cell...
fuss
?”

The student nodded, and the professor
continued. “I’ll give you the answer,” he said, and then did something decidedly
strange.

He bent to the ear of a girl scribbling
notes. She jerked upright, belatedly coming up to speed with events. He
whispered in her ear, and when she simply stared at him, winked and whipped a
hand parallel to the front row. She caught on, leaned toward the girl seated
beside her, and whispered in her ear.

Murmur grew as understanding of the
impromptu game rippled through the audience. A few laughed. The message passed
with increasing speed to the end of the first row, skipped up a row, and bounded
back in the opposite direction. Its track reminded Rasputin of the protein
chain woven through the text on the screen. The message passed from head to
head, each pair converging to exchange the secret.

If it hadn’t been for the way the professor
tracked its progress with twinkling eye, Rasputin would have suspected him of
time-wasting.

More than a minute had elapsed when the
baton-pass entered the final leg, and bore down on the student whose question
had ignited the game. He retrieved it from a girl with ash-blonde hair, who
didn’t seem to want to get too near him. Rasputin, mere feet from the final
exchange, barely heard her murmur.

“If you’d please,” called the professor.
“The answer? Speak up.”

The student stood, and, twisting a
belt-loop self-consciously, said: “We doubt we need be all matched up.” His
voice rose as though he were asking a question.

The professor laughed, a generous sound,
and the audience responded in kind.

“Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Please sit down.”

When the noise had died away, he said,
“What I actually said, as some of you already know, was: Without it we’d all be
so much soup.”

“Every cell in our body is a little drug
factory. Without its error-correcting machines, they would slowly but surely
begin turning out junk proteins. Your veins would run with sewage, your tissues
be awash in garbage.”

He raised a finger for emphasis.

“Worse! Do not forget that these little
factories also turn out other little factories, replicate
themselves
.
Every cell holds a complete blueprint of your entire body: DNA. And DNA is
simply another protein. The message written in that DNA is just as susceptible
to corruption when copied as any other protein. Remember our game? Some of you
mumbled, some didn’t listen, some forgot, and some were too concerned about the
body smell of their neighbour to get too close.”

He waited for silence, and said: “But, for
your body, the stakes are higher than our game. The loser gets cancer.”

He turned to look at the screen.

“That protein chain—” he began, then pivoted
to ask a question: “Who will hazard a guess as to what it is?”

Conversation broke out like spot fires.
Rasputin examined the figure, not caring what it was. But as he looked, it
became animated. The clumsy drawing was suddenly sublimated into a neat
representation of the protein. Each island in its chain was replaced by a
textbook-precise rendering, stolen from his memory of biology lectures.

It became a many-coloured snake. He
suppressed a gasp when it lifted its head from the screen and into the room. It
swung a moment above the audience, and then did something no real snake could
do: it folded back on itself, at many points along its length, at seemingly
random locations. It folded acutely, in a way that would have snapped the spine
of a real snake. It continued to fold and interlock until its beginning and end
were lost within an irregular, three dimensional cluster of protein islands.

Recognition lit his mind and flared from
his mouth: “It’s an alpha chain of Haemoglobin.”

Unfortunately, the hubbub had died prior to
this ejaculation, in anticipation of the answer. But no one appeared to have
expected it from the rear of the theatre. The professor took it in his stride.

“Correct. It is indeed one of four chains
that make up Haemoglobin, the protein that even now is carting oxygen about
your body, fuelling your hungry brains.”

He replaced the slide with another. “Here
is the full and folded molecule.”

The picture on the screen was
computer-generated rather than drawn. It showed a molecule comprised of
hundreds of small building blocks. When folded into a three dimensional
structure by its inherent potential, it looked, to Rasputin, like the knobbly,
plastic balls found in supermarket two-dollar bins.

Part of the molecule pulsed with light, the
part Rasputin had recognised—
scanned, folded and recognised
, he amended.
The light limning the protein faded, leaving him feeling as if his mind were
making sure he believed it. Self-indulgently, smugly, making sure.

“One mistake transcribing this,” the
professor said, “and you get, instead, this.” He replaced the slide with one depicting
a warped Haemoglobin molecule. “
Sickle-cell anaemia
. Great for malaria.
Not so good for living beyond thirty.” He held up a finger. “Just one mistake,”
he said, and, curiously, chuckled.

The lecture was over, and the theatre
emptied in a squall of scraping chair-legs and talk. Rasputin made his way
against the flow down to the floor.

The professor was collecting his
transparencies when he noticed Rasputin out of the corner of his eye.

“Ah, Mr. Haemoglobin,” he said. “I must
have forgotten your name.”

“I’m not sure you’d know it, sir,” said
Rasputin.

“I’m not British,
mijn jonge
. No ‘sirs’.
I assume this is not the first time you have taken my course.”

“I haven’t taken your course. I’m
visiting.”

The professor’s brow drew down in
consternation, his eyebrows bristling like two grey caterpillars facing off.

Rasputin hastened to add, “I must have seen
Haemoglobin’s sequence before. Funny how some things stick in your memory.”

The professor nodded. “Funny.” He piled his
slides into a battered tinned-soup box, and said, “Help an old man. I’m sure
your muscles match that memory of yours.”

Rasputin tried to imagine a body that
would
match his memory, and failed.

He lifted the box with his free hand,
propped it against his chest, and waited for the professor to lead the way. The
professor switched the projector off, the snap of its plastic switch echoing in
the now-empty theatre, and walked up the isle to the exit with a sprightliness
that belied his age.

His office was on the same floor as the
lecture theatre, a short trip down a corridor connecting offices and a lunch
room to the foyer. On entering it, Rasputin rested his cane against the wall,
and lowered the box with both hands to the floor.

Without a word, the professor sat and began
to check email. Rasputin used the moment to survey the office. Aside from the
computer, the only electrical appliance in the room was an ancient bar heater.
Despite the sun-drenched day outside, its single bar was bright red, radiating
heat at the professor’s back. The heater’s warmth seemed to have raised aromas
latent in the thick carpet—boiled lollies, tea, and liniment. A bowl nestled
between keyboard and computer was filled to the brim with paper clips, broken
staple blocks, and drawing pins, an old magpie’s hoard. A half-size bookshelf
was crammed with birthday and Christmas cards, nested for lack of space.