Dark Matter (36 page)

To Rasputin’s shock, the instant the man
laid his palm upon the flesh, he shrank to a pinpoint of light. His body
deflated as though it were a plastic bag rapidly evacuated of air. Appearing
exactly where his hand had been, an angry whorl of light bloomed and fled up
the tether, too fast to track, and was gone.

Rasputin breathed easy again, and stared at
the creature in wonder. He had been too afraid to reveal his presence and ask
his question, but he would make learning by observation his new mantra. He
approached the newest neck.

Up close he noted the young skin’s
translucency. It reminded him of raw squid. Beneath it, light pulsed, down into
whatever gullet the creature had, and up in smaller amounts, pumped there by
whatever served it for a heart. Such a great quantity of the stuff was in
motion that he could hear it—the slow thunder of swallowing, and riding over
it, the faster rhythm of its pulse.

His heart throbbed too, competing with the
creature’s noise.

He reached out his hand but paused. He
remembered when he had touched the silver memory-stuff, the cloying despair he
felt as it began to catalogue him. The sense of staring into a bottomless
shaft, and an inescapable loss of balance. He shuddered.

Steeling himself, he took his palm and, as
the man had done, pressed it against the translucent skin.

It felt soft and elastic, and sticky, and
only then did he realise he had not disappeared as the man had. But the realisation
was swept away by the sensations that began to tingle in his fingers and ride
up his arm.

He struggled to understand what he felt
travelling beneath the creature’s skin—not shapes, but something like shapes.
They flowed across the plane of his consciousness like the stream of a
shade-dappled road seen from a car. There were distinct forms, connections, and
relations, but he could not hold them long enough to really see them. They were
only the shadows of something else—shadows on Plato’s cave wall, and out beyond
his grasp, their substance was blooming into being.

He concentrated harder. He swiped his hand
across the skin in an attempt to track the flow of images, if only for a moment
to arrest them for inspection.

For a moment he saw clearly. He glimpsed
the abstract beauty of a Mandelbrot set, the weird art rendered by incestuous
mathematical functions. It looked like an alien insect.

But no sooner had he seen this than the
sensation in his finger tips faded. He felt the skin lose elasticity and
toughen. Scales formed over the tender flesh, and, just before it lost all translucency,
he saw a branching filigree of veins spreading up the neck.

He squinted up at the head, which still
sucked single-mindedly on its supply line, and to his surprise saw the veins
bursting upward beneath the still-translucent skin of the tether. The red
marbling raced away until distance diminished it. He had the feeling it reached
all the way to the cavern wall.

Something nudged him. With a start he realised
the creature had grown. Its girth had thickened and its flanks were pressing
against his legs. No real creature could grow so fast.

He stepped backwards, only to bump against
something else. He spun and stared straight into a gaze of cut sapphire.

It was the man.

“You still shouldn’t be here,” he said.

Rasputin woke.

***

In the short weeks of his friendship
with Reim, Rasputin had grown to read the subtleties of emotion revealed in the
skin like sun-split riverbed around his eyes. The man smiled easily and his
words were always lofted on an air of geniality. His was a vibrant inner life
that spilt outwards, its super-abundance flowing to the benefit of all with
impartiality.

But there was something unreadable in his
face today.

Rasputin ordered at the counter on
autopilot, wondering whether he had at last pushed this opportunistic
friendship too far and become a burden to the old man.

He paid, retrieved his order, and walked
out into the alfresco area of the café. He found Reim sitting at a table
overlooking the moat at the base of the university’s Reid Library. His gaze was
lost to some point beneath the scummy water, not drawn to and fro by a pair of
busy ducks.

“Cracking the HIV code?” said Rasputin.

Reim took a moment to reply, as if his
abstracted attention was a heavy weight that first needed recalling. He smiled
deliberately.

“No. I leave that to greater minds, or more
stubborn, than mine. Besides, HIV is a whole family by now, each strain having
its peculiarities. Domestic courts are the worst.”

Rasputin sipped his tea. Over the rim of
his cup, he saw Reim’s gaze resting on him. Gone was the detachment that had
been there that morning. He seemed to be examining him now.

“You are tired.”

“I would love to be just
tired
,”
Rasputin replied. The thought of waking in the morning and rising refreshed had
taken on the feel of myth. It had left the realm of reality long ago, hand in
hand with Santa.

“The world is run by tired people.”

Rasputin paused, cup half-lifted to his
lips. “It shows.”

“I got your blood work back this morning.”

Rasputin tightened his grip on the cup.

Reim continued, “I should say, this morning
I got your final set of results.”

“I only gave blood once.”

“I requested the tests be done again.”

“Why would you do that?”

It was Reim’s turn now to drink.

“The first made no sense.”

“They were botched?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Reim reached into his satchel, which was
made of the skin of some long dead animal, and hunted for something. Presently
he laid a stapled stack of paper on the table between them.

“Because these make no sense either.”

Rasputin nudged his phone aside, which had
become something of a fetish since his text-conversation in the park, then
swivelled the paper the right way up to read. It was a report, congested with
numbers and abbreviations, but light on explanatory text. It was nonsense to
him.

He said the only intelligent thing that
came to mind: “This looks more like a game of Sudoku than a path lab report.”

“It’s not from a path lab,” Reim said, and,
in response to Rasputin’s unspoken question, continued. “It’s from my lab.”

“Your lab?”

“Yes. Both of them, to be precise.”

“Now you’re not making any sense.”

“Then let me be sensible,” said Reim, in
another of the unintentional mis-utterances in his idiolect that Rasputin found
endearing. “I submitted the sample of your blood to my lab that enables my work
on biomarkers of neurological disease. We have developed a battery of tests,
well worn by now, and cheap. I won’t bore you with the details—”

“Bore away.”

“The lab ran your blood through DNA
microarrays targeting specific genes. A single strand of DNA has a sequence of
three billion base pairs. Our tests only fish for a fraction of that amount. It’s
like trawling alphabet soup with a sieve that only catches a specific letter.”

“But the bowl holds a billion litres?”

“Yes, and, to be pedantic, we’re actually
looking for phrases not letters.”

“What did you catch?”

“Something Greek.”

“Okay.”

“We use an English phrase book.”

“Oh.”

Reim flicked the edge of the report with a
leathery finger as though it were to blame.

“So, of course, I assumed someone had not
followed the recipe, and asked for the tests to be repeated: same result.”

Reim looked askance at Rasputin before
continuing. “I took charge personally, then, and upped the ante. I subjected
your blood to a more expensive, a more comprehensive, test.”

“Your other lab, right?” said Rasputin,
trying to track Reim’s flow.

A thought occurred to him: “Did I get you
in trouble?”

Reim’s eyebrows popped up, a bushy
exclamation, as if he had just then perceived Rasputin’s concern. He laughed.

“No, no,
mijn
jonge
. The test
was expensive, but that lab has a budget bigger than the GDP of some
countries.”

Reim’s hand idly stroked his leathern
satchel. Rasputin smiled at the juxtaposition it created with the confession of
a man driving a lab with a GDP-sized budget.

“So this other other lab—is it the
cross-dressing lab that goes out with the ladies on Thursday nights?”

Reim smiled. Rasputin sensed it was because
he had been waiting for the question, had invited it.

“Have you ever seen a babushka doll?”

“Of course. Hollow wooden dolls. You crack
the first and find nested within a smaller copy, and on it goes until you reach
the solid little babushka at its heart, no bigger than a pea.”

Reim looked mildly put out before
continuing. “Yes, well, my analogy is not perfect. My lab, the expensive one,
is actually a lab within a lab within the department of biology.”

“How does one crack open the facade?”

“My voice will do it. Or a numerical code—standard
security for a C2 bio-hazard containment facility.” Reim’s hand brushed the
lapel of his coat, absent-mindedly, the way a child might tug at a lock of
hair.

Rasputin was tracking Reim’s revelation
mentally. He imagined the first babushka doll cleaved in two, and emerging from
within a smaller, meaner looking woman, perhaps with a recurved blade in hand.

A memory rose, of wandering past the
research lab situated on the basement level of the physical sciences building,
a stone’s throw from where they now sat. He saw the signage hanging on its
frosted glass front, and furrowed his brow.

“Wait a minute. That lab is only C4.”

“The neuro-genetics lab is. Its protocols
keep out any but staff and visiting bureaucrats, and it serves as a kind of—”
Reim hunted for a word, his hands wheeling over each other, “—
poortgebouw
.
In English, a gatehouse, protecting the inner sanctum. Only the initiated are
even aware of the inner lab’s presence, let alone equipped with the information
to authenticate themselves and enter. The neuro lab is the perfect rind,
protecting the sweet fruit within.”

The penny dropped for Rasputin. He lowered
his voice to a whisper. “You’re serious. You have a secret C2 lab hidden within
your research lab?”

Reim laughed. “You can speak up. Whispers
are guaranteed to draw attention, but I think you can relax. No one here is
going to care. That’s the beauty of the arrangement. The lab sits right in the
middle of a university, surrounded by students with their heads lost in ideas
or life, sharing the high priority power grid with nearby Charles Gardener
hospital, geo-stable, and covered by the facade of a live research lab that
camouflages the comings and goings of staff such as myself and much of the
supplies and equipment required to keep it running, while screening off the
vast bulk of the public and would-be nosey parkers. My lab is the little clownfish
living in the anemone—living just down there.” Reim prodded a finger at the
lawn surrounding the moat.

“Down there?” Rasputin said, incredulous.
Reim just flexed his eyebrows in confirmation. “Except it’s your clownfish has
the sting.”

The sheen of humour fell from Reim’s face
as he nodded. “The worst kind.”

Reim took a swig of tea and stared at the
spot on the lawn beneath which Rasputin imagined must lie the secret lab.

Rasputin waited for Reim to go on. He was
eager to learn what kind of sting Reim’s fish had.

“I have always been attracted to
universities,” Reim said. “Here ideas pile up in eclectic layers like office
detritus, and no one is ever sure if anything can be thrown away.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he continued. “I’m
not enamoured of ideas for ideas sake. Intelligent men can say dumb things. The
most intelligent the dumbest, it seems. But I like that here they don’t quite
die.”

Reim and Rasputin sipped tea in sync.
Rasputin waited. Reim talked on.

“The university also receives impressions
from outside on a more mundane level. Did you know there was a bomb shelter
beneath that lawn?”

Rasputin shook his head.

“Bit of a white elephant as it turned out,
thankfully. Another plus for Western Australia. Part of it became a marshalling
area for cabling and plumbing. It now houses the most sophisticated protein
sequencing equipment in the state.” He winked. “But if you look closely, you
can still find evidence of its original purpose. See, history preserved.”

“It was built to keep bombs out, small
conventional ones at any rate. Then co-opted to keep power and sewage in, and
in that it comes much closer to its current purpose. Because not so long after
the cold war thawed, concerned scientists saw that the humane genome would be
mapped, and that that mapping would be to biological weapons what quantum
theory was to the development of nuclear weapons.”