Dark Matter (39 page)

No one spoke, and Rasputin found the mood
of solemnity catching. He swung his door open and was bathed in a breeze
streaming down over the shadowed hillside. It felt deliciously cool, and only
then did he realise he was drenched in sweat. He tried to rise, and succeeded
on the third attempt. An exhaustion that had been dormant as he lay on the seat
woke and fastened itself to him.

“Can you get the house open?” he said. “I
need to lie down.”

He fancied he saw Jordy bite back a remark.

Dee dug the house key from its cache, and
within minutes they were in the house. She began to lay a fire in the stove for
hot water while Jordy fetched their luggage from the car. Rasputin concentrated
on putting one foot in front of the other. He crossed the kitchen’s linoleum
floor, feeling the wood beneath flex and creak.

“Where am I sleeping,” he said, feeling the
effort cost him.

She straightened.

“Second room off the hall,” she said.
“Monk, you’re drenched.”

“Must’ve got a bit hot in the back.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had the AC on
full. I thought you’d be okay.”

He shuffled out of the kitchen and found
his room. The single bed had linen folded at its foot, but it was all he could
do to collapse onto its bare mattress. He shut his eyes and heard the fire in
the kitchen click and pop as it fed on kindling, and over that, the ticking of
the iron roof as it settled in the dropping temperature. He fell directly into
a deep sleep.

He awoke to darkness.

Someone had covered him with a sheet. It
was slicked down over his body with sweat. He peeled it back and sat up. He was
still, listening to his breathing, while his eyes adapted to a faint light. He
looked and through the room’s only window saw a square of star-shot sky. It
beckoned.

He rose, struck by a sudden portentous
feeling. Perhaps it was the sensation of waking in an unfamiliar place. He
groped in the dark, and found his phone on the floor by the bed. He turned it
on, and waited, knowing there would be a message for him.

There was none.

He put the phone away and hugged himself;
the old house had clung to a remnant of winter’s chill.

He eased the door to the hall open and
navigated by feel into the kitchen. The fire had burned down to coals. Their
deep red light shone through the grill and lit the room with a surreal glow.

He let himself out onto the back veranda,
easing the screen door shut behind him to mute the shriek of its aged spring.

A path split the back yard, a grey bar in
the darkness. He followed it, navigating by feel past the yard’s fence until
his feet bit into dry grass. He kept walking, mindless of the stalks of wild
oats that slipped between his toes, to be stripped of seed with a faint
thrip
.

A hundred metres from the dark house he
halted. He was staring, as he had since leaving the house, into the sky,
enthralled.

Above him the Milky Way blazed with a glory
that stunned him. Instead of the few, scattered stars he was used to seeing
through Perth’s haze, he saw the wide band like a dense mist whose every
droplet was a massive primeval engine, the brightest like diamond studs.

He tilted his head and twisted to follow
the galaxy’s axis from one horizon to the other, and was struck by a sudden
inversion. All his life the night sky had been only a backdrop. But in that
moment, their roles reversed. The dark hills lost their rondure and shrank to a
paltry two dimensions, while the stars dilated into three. How parochial was
the Earth! It was the Milky Way that stretched below the horizon. Continued
beyond. Had no end. Figure and ground were swapped.

How vulnerable was his little island of
warmth in the face of that vast sea of cold? In time it would quench the sun’s
fire, and the Earth become a dead rock roaming space. No soul would remain to
remember Earth, let alone one called Rasputin.

Then another inversion.

He felt the sky draw down, as if to listen.

Warm currents suddenly flowed, branched,
and reformed in that dark sea. It became at once vast and cosseting.

The Milky Way’s band brightened as the
stars began to crowd each other. Shadows sprang from beneath the field’s
grasses and spun like needles on a million compasses. But as the stars
continued to swell and merge, the shadows bled away—and disappeared altogether
as the sky became an unbroken sheet of white.

Rasputin wheeled, and saw an endless plain
of grass beneath a sky that ought to have burnt his eyes to charcoal. Gone were
the hills. Gone was the house.

He knew then that he was
within
.

Striding across the plain toward him came
the figure of a man. He threw no shadow beneath that sky, nor would he have if
there had been but one sun. He glowed brighter than the sky.

The horizon dogged his steps. It was
irising, closing upon Rasputin, consuming the plain in silence with its
white-hot fire.

Rasputin knew before the man reached him,
before his effulgence dimmed enough for Rasputin to discern his features, who
it was that approached: the inventor, tamer, judge. In another guise he had
been the orb that had melted a hole in his mind and laid bare his inner world.

Fear rode Rasputin’s body like electric
current, but he stood still to meet him. What had he come to claim?

The horizon shrank to within meters as the
man came to rest before him.

“Now am I allowed to be here?” Rasputin
said, trusting once more to the joke’s ready defence.

The man smiled.

“Allowed, and required,” he said. He wore a
cloak, and with one hand opened a flap. “Hide here.”

Rasputin took one look at the silent fire
closing from every side, then hunched forward, crouching to enter the space
made for him. He turned to look out.

“What are you doing?” Rasputin said. The
fire was so close he could have reached beyond the cloak’s fold to touch it.

“Remaking you.”

“Will it hurt,” Rasputin said, as the
white-fire licked the cloak’s cloth.

“Childbirth always brings pain. And
sometimes joy.”

The flap of cloak fell, shutting out the
light, and Rasputin knew no more.

CAIN

It’s late, but I can see you are eager
to know how my journey began, when the man who walked this road was called
Gottfried Schürman.

I walked it, then, in boots with inner
soles a fraction thicker than standard issue. Five foot ten inches was the
minimum height for soldiers admitted to the Waffen-SS. I fell short by only
half an inch, but wasn’t taking any chances. I wanted to be where my brother
was, and that was poised alongside three million men on the Western Front, not
in the halls of the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin (where I knew more
than my lecturers, in any case).

You might wonder why, with my blue blood, I
chose Himmler’s pet army rather than the
Wehrmacht.
The Navy was out of
the question. I piss enough water, didn’t need to make my home in it.
Luftwaffe?
Perhaps, but they would not have accepted me. I had a slight astigmatism in my
right eye—I say
had
. They would take me now, would take ten thousand of
me.
Das Heer
then?
Der Herr
, more like—yes sir, no sir. Not like
the SS.

The SS aimed to build a different kind of
soldier, in the words of Felix Steiner, “a supple, adaptable soldier”.

In what is now well worn history you’ll
recall how, with a few thousand tanks of the Panzer divisions, we punched a hole
in the front fifty miles wide, through the Ardennes, a landscape, according to
the French military experts, through which no modern army could manoeuvre, an
area ‘of no danger’. In a matter of days, the north of France was sliced clean
through to the channel, the famed French Armies shattered, the British
Expeditionary Force of 400,000 men thrown into the sea minus their equipment,
and Holland and Belgium conquered.

My brother and I celebrated in Brussels,
before beginning the specially assigned task of digging up native Belgians of
SS quality.

We were barracked in what had been the
residence of a wealthy Belgian. The former owner had exquisite taste in art—paintings,
sculpture, and antique furniture. The foyer had a Rubens.

One day a man came to survey the art. He
valued it, locked some items away from the encamped men, and took others. He
was a member of the
KunstSchutz
, the Art Protection Force, so-called. It
was a revelation.

I contacted my father and had him arrange
for me to be honourably discharged back into civilian life as rapidly as I had
left it, and employed by the
KunstSchutz
.

The
KunstSchutz
ostensibly existed
to care for art caught in the cross-fire of war. The Great War had erased many
irreplaceable works of art from the face of the earth. What’s more, the
trenches of that style of warfare had unearthed ancient treasures long hid, of
Celtic and other origin.

In reality, it was the inventorying and
clearing house for the Third Reich, the agent of Hitler and his planned Linz
Museum, and collector for the private estate of
Oberkommandant
Goering.

I didn’t care. Rarely does an art historian
have such wealth pass beneath his gaze. And if you were careful, there were
some sweet pickings to be had.

I did not expect sweet pickings the day I
was assigned to the Palace Mondial, to something called the Mundaneum, the
grand information fetish of a librarian named Paul Otlet. The rooms of this
Mundaneum were to be cleared to house fresh troops, and an exhibition of Third
Reich Art—the flower in the fist, and first shots fired in the cultural war for
the minds of Europe. I was tasked with assessing the worth of the Mundaneum’s
material.

Now, it is important for my story that you
understand something of the temper of those times. Only a few years prior, H.G.
Wells published his information age manifesto on the
World Brain
. I love
Wells. The Time Machine is one of my favourite books. But he believed the
salvation of man lay in the synthesis of knowledge. There was such a mess, he
said, of knowledge scattered throughout the world, in different journals and
languages. Work went unheeded, unknown, and the wheel was destined to be
invented many times over. Wells’ answer was a society built upon an
encyclopaedia—
the
encyclopaedia—alive, growing, interconnecting experts
around the globe. “A new all human cerebellum. A cerebral cortex, for which
university research departments would be essential ganglia,” laying bare “the
whole of human memory...to every individual.” Not to mention the basis for a
global, totalitarian government, a socialist utopia.

Wells was not the only Encyclopaedist,
merely the best known. Many scholars and statesman caught the vision of Solomon’s
House propounded by Bacon centuries before. Among them was Otlet. Indeed, he
met Wells in 1937. The novelist was much impressed with the little Belgian. But
Otlet saw further than any of them.

And it was his apparatus, and its corpus,
that lay before me that autumn day in 1940. It was an imposing sight. The
Mundaneum contained cabinets of 3 x 5 inch cards in the thousands, hundreds of
thousands, summaries and cross-references to information in quantities beyond
conception.

It was so imposing I flirted with the idea
of putting a match to the lot, in favour of a certain Belgian vintage I had
been enjoying.

As fate would have it, or accident—the
milkman of invention—the first card my fingers found at random was the stub for
an article that appeared in the British Medical Journal in 1886. I slid it from
among its cousins to inspect it. The article it represented was titled: “The ‘Elephant
Man’“.

I had heard of him. My nanny had used his
name as a threat for naughty children.

The card I had stumbled across piqued my
interest.

(There was at that time a renaissance of
that field of bio-medicine called Eugenics, a renaissance limited in scope to
the Reich. Eugenics attracted the interest of many Encyclopaedists too, for
what was the good of the perfect society without the perfect human?)

Then I noticed a curious feature of the
card system devised by Otlet, implemented by untold hours of human labour. At
the bottom of the card was an allowance of space for recording queries that
touched that card, and, intriguingly, the address of cards a querier
subsequently consulted.

What a fantastic little game! I soon
followed the link to the next card consulted by the only querier of that
article, simply noted as a Mr. G. It was for an article in the British Journal
of Dermatology published thirteen years later that claimed the Elephant Man had
suffered from von Recklinghausen’s disease. Seemed straightforward.

I hunted for the next link in the chain,
while the clamour of that Belgian vintage rose to press its claim on me. Just
one more card, I thought.

I had a time finding the next card as it
was located in a different cabinet. I pulled it from its place and examined it
under the flickering light of a war-torn power grid. It was an enigma.