Dark Matter (35 page)

He arched, grimacing, as a different kind of
pain tore at his back. He turned to see the form of a once-friend. He knew his
name, though he had scrubbed it from conscious thought—Haydn Stone. Haydn
walked hand in hand with a girl of unmistakable gait, Katy. (Rasputin had never
quite blotted out
her
name.) The couple receded into the distance,
fading to silhouette, blurring, touching, and merging.

The clamour rose and pressed on his ear
drums as though he were descending from a height. He shrank under the combined
weight of so much remembered ill will.

He wanted to escape back into the park
where his body sat. He glimpsed grass and trees and sunshine, but they drifted
on the fringe of consciousness like memory—good old-fashioned memory. Instead,
it was the eye-become-tortureplex that felt real and inescapable as fresh
grief.

He strained toward the surface, but fell,
flailing, in a dream of flying that was failing—

When he found an advocate.

He saw a face hitherto unnoticed in the
tumult of this sensory assault. It was Jordy.

He clutched at the memory. It was fresh,
barely a year old. Jordy had rebuked him for the way he spoke to Dee, for his
caustic tongue. Rasputin had brushed it off. It hadn’t helped that Jordy had
bottled the reprimand so long he was angry himself. (
He spat while talking—
spat!)
Then, in the cool of night, Rasputin had seen what had been invisible to him,
and repented.

It had stung. That was why his mind had
summoned this memory alongside the others. But it had been the surgeon’s wound,
the wound of a friend. To recall it was to remember he was not alone. It leant
him the strength to reach for the real world, touch it, and break free.

He blinked, in command of his body again,
and relished the afternoon’s cooling air.

A message was waiting for him: People are
real shits aren’t they.

“Some are,” he replied.

“Now try this. It’s fun. Pick someone—you’ll
know the one—and let your mind loose on them.”

The message’s idea woke a suspicion in the
depths of his mind, a faint claxon. But it was too near and full of flame. He
grabbed it before the claxon rallied the rest of him to its warning.

He sat again within the eye, but this time
he was not alone. Seated before him was the summoned ghost of Haydn Stone, or,
rather, a hyper-real recreation of him, a patchwork memory construct. The one
flaw that threatened to jar Rasputin’s suspension of disbelief that this was
indeed Haydn Stone (assuming he still lived) was that
this
Haydn Stone,
sitting staring sullenly back, was 14 years his junior. This doppelganger was
built of old parts. But it would do.

The eye too was altered, but no less a
torture chamber. Cluttering its walls were every tool for evoking pain
ransacked from Rasputin’s experience—actual and vicarious. The brass knuckles
of every lip-splitting punch; the iron maiden of Fiction’s ghouls; the rack of
slow-burn, mental dismemberment (Orwell’s 1984 stood front-and-centre); and the
Water Torture of the daily grind for bread that turned to ashes in the mouth.

He surveyed the array of apparatus and then
cast a speculative, sidelong glance at Haydn’s clear skin and square jaw.

Knuckle-dusters
, he thought, and reached for them.

The shadows of the eastward trees were
reaching deep into the park when he surfaced.

Haydn Stone the memory-construct sat beside
him on the bench, a mind-excrescence exuded into the real world. He had aged, a
simple trick learned in the preceding hour, of applying patterns of aging
deduced from many observations of the process. He had matched Haydn to his own
age, and then driven him into senescence.

Haydn, the senior, sat hunched on the
bench, dragged earthward by pound upon pound of fat. His scalp was a pattern of
bizarrely young-looking pink skin and yellow liver-spots, relieved only by a
fuzz of white hair that clung in patches. This Haydn was half-way to losing his
identity to the ravages of dementia, and, above all, lonely. Abandoned.

As Rasputin considered his one-time friend,
he noticed on the wall of the eye a tool he had not yet wielded. It was rare
for being a lived experience. It was the knowledge of having killed one’s
sister.

He glanced at Haydn and weighed adding
that
burden to a mind already smothered.

“And, no,” said Rasputin. “You don’t get to
change places with her, make it right. No matter how much you want to.”

Haydn’s glassy stare remained fixed on
Rasputin, peering out from the wrinkled craters of his eye sockets, a canine
stare. He seemed to sense Rasputin’s thought—something possible, Rasputin
grimly knew, because he was
of
it.

Instead, he put the weapon down, and let
Haydn rise, to wander across the field, and disappear.

Rasputin wrapped his arms about his torso
and cast a furtive glance about the park. Still empty.

A message waited on the phone.

“Heady, isn’t it.”

He didn’t reply. The shadows had already
swallowed the far side of the park, and now the sun dipped below the horizon,
ceding the sky to one of summer’s long twilights.

Another message arrived.

“Till next time. Enjoy the park.”

A moment passed before the import of those
last three words struck. He sat bolt upright and searched the limits of the park
for an observer. He found only the same trees, bins, and benches, looking
forlorn in the second-hand light.

He rose and hobbled home, feeling like a
child straining toward lit places against the suck of a dark room.

Rasputin floated in the void.

He was there because of something Reim had
said that morning while sailing, their fifth voyage in two weeks. It had given
him an idea. It had set up an itch.

To scratch it, he had chosen the main café
on campus. He had sat at an unoccupied table by a window overlooking the
cricket oval, and ruefully let his belt out a notch. (Dee was right. He
was
putting on weight.) He had steeped a while in the chatter, enjoying the
anonymity, and picked at the calluses thickening on his fingers. Then he had
wrapped his awareness in the eye’s sky.

Reim had mused on
genius—
a favourite
topic, and one Rasputin thought was the old man’s attempt to normalise him.
Specifically, Reim argued that what was deemed to constitute genius changed
like fashion.

To prove his point he took two men: Thomas
Aquinas and Albert Einstein. Aquinas’s genius was ascribed by his mediaeval
contemporaries to his prodigious memory. He could absorb and recall any text he
had read, and thus synthesise new knowledge. Einstein’s genius, on the other
hand, was ascribed by his colleagues to a powerful imagination. His flights of
fancy jounced him from the ruts of conventional thinking, and let him ride a
beam of starlight while wondering if he would be able to see his face in a
mirror.

Both kinds of genius bore fruit. Aquinas’s
scholasticism led to the creation of the first universities; Einstein’s fancies
sparked the Quantum revolution that gave the world transistors, computers,
lasers, and instant, global communication.

But must it be memory
versus
imagination? Surely each needed the other. A ballerina cannot lift herself into
the air, and the ballet dancer needs her crowning grace.

Memory and imagination.

Rasputin’s journey through his memory had
been wrought by his imagination (so went his train of thought) and what had he
found at journey’s end? An inventor. A judge. One to make, and one to assess.

Therein lay the itch. Making what?
Assessing what?

Perhaps the inventor-judge was only a
dream, but even dreamlings had intentions, albeit indecipherable or absurd.

Rasputin wanted to know what they were.

Curiosity burned in him as he drew near a
glistening patch of darkness that indicated a pocket in the void. He had found
it within seconds of searching. They appeared to be multiplying in new
constellations of blisters, swollen and tinted by the opalescent pus of
whatever lay beneath their surfaces.

He willed himself to enter through the
crack to the pocket’s interior. He had no way of knowing if this was the pocket
he had visited before, but he tensed against the prospect of finding someone
within.

As he crossed the threshold, and the view
spread out impossibly, he saw that the place was unfamiliar. This was a cavern
such as one might find at the root of a mountain. Its floor was carpeted in a
thick mass of vegetation like curling fern-frond. Currents ran at cross-angles
in the green sea with no apparent cause.

The curve of the eye vanished, dispersing
like a mist rather than rupturing like a bubble. Rasputin stepped into the
flora, and sunk knee deep. It felt wet, but when he ran a hand through it, he
found it bone-dry.

Light swirled over distant walls, and rode
spires to clash and coruscate over an object in the cavern’s centre. But
already he could see this object was not the quivering, intricate construction
he had found in the other pocket. That had reminded him of an oil rig, turned
on its side, and probed and stretched by currents of an unseen ocean.

This thing looked alive. Like the stuff
through which he waded, it was
biota.

He was wading toward the thing in the centre
when he halted. Fear more visceral than the threat of discovery gripped him.
Through splayed fingers he saw at last that the object in the middle of the
cavern was a creature, a vast mass of flesh. Waving above its body like
dock-side cranes were cylindrical growths, which gave it the appearance of a
many-headed hydra. Each head suckled on a spire connected to the cavern’s wall,
gulping down great swallows of light. Bulges of it travelled down the necks in
peristaltic waves.

As he watched, a lump formed on the beast’s
flesh. The same light playing beneath the creature’s skin gathered in the
protuberance and intensified. It rose, lengthened, and thinned. A bulb formed
at its base and rose up the neck until if popped free like a snail’s eye
arriving at the end of its distended stalk. A crease split the bulb, and all at
once it opened in voiceless cries of hunger.

Rasputin crouched down among the fronds,
wondering if the thing ate human.

Far above the new hydra head, at a point on
the wall directly above it, something else was happening. Tatters of
many-coloured light came streaming from every direction, spiralling into that
point. The light mixed and grew bright, waxing until it seemed the naked sun
had broken through.

And then something else broke through.

The silhouette of a man showed briefly
against light. As he fell toward the cavern floor, something long and thin
spooled out behind him.

Rasputin threw himself face first among the
fronds. He fancied he heard a shout of glee.

The man dropped among the vegetation,
tether in hand, the other end of which appeared anchored to the centre of the
portal of light above.

When Rasputin had summoned the courage to
raise his head and peek again at the man, he confirmed his fear: it was the man
he had met before. Here, in this cavern, he wore a pith helmet and safari suit,
but he was unmistakable.

Tugging the tether along behind him, the
man approached the creature. Its new head bent low, and snuffled at the ground
before the man.

Rasputin’s skin tingled with anticipation.

The man reached up and patted the creature’s
flank, then lifted the end of the tether to its gaping maw. It drew back a
moment, then snapped its jaws over the tether.

A tremor shook the cavern floor. The tether
poking from the creature’s mouth drew thin as though it were a straw sucked on
by an immense force. Above, where the tether threaded the eye of the portal, it
began to glow and widen. Light trickled in droplets and runnels down the tether
and it widened to accommodate the flow.

The creature seemed to sense it coming. It
sucked harder until the tether became a solid line of light. Its neck swelled
with succour. Its mouth fused with the thickening tether, bonding with it as
with a teat, and, like its mates, became one with it.

The man watched a moment, as if to ensure
the connection secure—or perhaps to enjoy his handiwork. Then he walked to
within touching distance of the creature’s flank, reached out, took hold, and
began to climb. As each of his hands and feet touched its flesh, light eddied and
seemed to wash over them, as though he crawled in luminous water.

He climbed as far as the base of one of the
creature’s necks and halted. The neck was as thick as an ancient redwood, and
its head towered far above him, grafted to a tether that stretched in a bowing
line to the distant side of the cavern. If the height and thickness of the neck
were any judge of its age, this had to have been the first to sprout.

The man reached a hand toward the surface
of the neck, and Rasputin wondered if he meant to climb it too.