Dark Matter (41 page)

Reim paused, waiting for some reply, but
the line just fizzed with static.

“It is either this absurd truth,” Reim
said, “or our eyes deceive us, and he is in fact dead already, has been for
weeks. I’d hazard you prefer the former explanation, as do I.”

Reim ran on, speaking to himself. “I see at
last, a little light. To perform this transformation for a creature so large,
to assemble the necessary genetic machinery, not simply to survive but to
change. It is to play a million games of chess blindfolded against a million
grand masters, at the highest stakes, and win them all. It is the most
improbable event. Or the product of a calculation of singular complexity... And
a change into what?”

Dee spoke again, her tone warbling a
little. “We’re calling an ambulance.”

“No!” Reim cried, and feared he had
startled them when the line went momentarily silent.

“No?”

“No. Let me come first. What will doctors
do? You know what happens to creatures for whom the process of metamorphosis is
aborted.”

He wanted to laugh, expecting at any minute
a reprieve from this practical joke, a camera crew and host, smiling at a
fooled old fool. This is your life, Professor De Groot. But still the phone
ticked and popped.

Dee spoke again, and still wasn’t laughing.

“I can’t even take his pulse any more,” she
said. “What if he’s dying?”

“If he is, he is beyond our science.” He
pleaded with his hands, a useless gesture. “Wait. Please. I will come.”

CAIN

Every
human has dormant within them a phase change?

I had expected a revelation from this
Clotho, not garden variety absurdity. Perhaps he had been enjoying a little too
much of the
flieger schokolade
?

But it was entertaining. I read on.

He traced a schema of the history leading
to his bald assertion. This phase change,
he said, was hinted at in
records of antiquity—accidents, happy or hapless. Most hints were
manifestations of aborted phase changes. Unhappy monsters. Mortally-wounded
geniuses.

Now my mind was tantalised by that word
Imago
—the
adult creature that emerges from the chrysalis. But the pragmatist in me still
cried ludicrous.

He must have anticipated my incredulity,
because he began to list specific cases, specific men. He began with Joseph
Merrick, dubbed the Elephant Man by his freak-show managers.

I read the name and thought if ever there
was one that proved the opposite of latent celestial power in man it was him.
His form was grotesque beyond description. I paused from reading the message to
retrieve the vial containing a portion of his epidermis. It floated in
chloroform with the appearance of an exotic mushroom. I am used to cadavers,
and, unlike so many happy citizens, am able to recognise the ex-human in
whatever context I see it. But his skin looked alien to me. Many who saw him
alive wondered what manner of being he was.

But Clotho told a different tale. He
asserted that Joseph Merrick was the bullet that never left the chamber because
flawed. He was one in whom the phase change had been triggered, but then some
vital part of the complex machinery had gone awry, some chain had snagged in a
gear, causing the whole thing to blow apart by the forces set in motion.
Instead of the beautiful ballistic curve reaching its target, it had exploded
at the point of origin. His body had exploded in deformity of bone and flesh on
a scale never before recorded in the annals of medicine, or indeed any society.

For Joseph, the cocoon had failed
cataclysmically. The crux of the process, the transformation of his inner man,
had not even begun.

Clotho gave me more names. One I remember
well, partly for the contrast he made with Merrick: Blaise Pascal.

Pascal was what we call a Renaissance man,
the last caste of humanity to claim all of nature and the horizons of reason
for his domain before that land was fractured by the ineluctable reductivism and
specialisation axiomatic to Science. Pascal pioneered in mathematics, physics,
and philosophy.

Clotho told me something about Pascal I had
never heard. On November 23, 1654 Pascal had what he called ‘A night of fire’.
That day he and friends narrowly escaped death when their carriage careened
through a barricade. Their horses fell from a cliff, leaving the carriage
teetering at its edge. Pascal was so overcome by his near-death experience he
fainted, to lapse for hours into a coma. So critical did he deem the experience
that when he awoke he recorded it on a scrap of paper, and sewed it into the
lining of his suit, to have with him at all times.

Pascal interpreted this intervention as a
visit by the Divine. Clotho read it differently—or, perhaps, read more from it.
He asserted Pascal had suffered merely the tremors of true change, which were
capable alone of lifting the power of his mind to a new echelon, and were
evidenced by the quality of the treatises that hence issued from his pen.

Clotho claimed for his hypothesis Euler’s
meticulous mind, Aquinas’s monolithic memory, Mozart’s musical genius, Tesla’s
mental gymnastics, and Samson’s doomed strength. The list went on and on, as
though he meant to smother my unvoiced objections with sheer weight of evidence.

When the transmission ended, sleet still
rushed upon the schloss, but the fire had burnt low.

Clotho’s explanation was an invitation to
more inquiry, which I grasped immediately. The following day another call came,
but this time the agent asked if I had need to transmit a ciphered message. I
said yes, and while he waited silent, I tried the machine. I typed my
questions, and watched the ciphered version appear before me, which I spoke
into the telephone.

I was direct with Clotho. I asked for
evidence of those who had “matured” successfully, then hung up.

He must have guessed my mind in advance,
knowing his catalogue of oddities would not witness sufficiently to some
universal and untapped potential in humankind. A third call came within the
hour.

I arranged the machine before me, and
waited, giddy, for more information.

The agent talked. I typed.

Clotho said his case list—his
Bestiary
,
he called it—had only served him in retrospect, viewed through the lens of
those who succeeded in the change. Of these he offered proof of three:

Case One was a man formerly known as Mihai
Patras, a Roumanian. He suffered a blow to the head in a fight with a cousin
over the will of a deceased uncle. He fell into a coma that lasted two weeks,
and when he emerged began to exhibit unnatural insight. As mutterings grew
about suspected sorcery, Mihai took to wandering the mountains alone. His wife
watched as her husband, formerly so voluble, grew silent.

One evening he did not return from hiking
beneath the alpine forests. His body, or something like it, was found lying in
a woodcutter’s hut. He was buried and mourned. A month later he burst from the
grave, clear of mind and sound of health. The cry of Vampyr was raised, and he
was driven from his home.

You will not find any record of Mihai. No
documents are extant. They are all burned or lost or confiscated.

Case Two was a woman, a Scot, named Mary
Ashcroft. She contracted encephalitis, showed signs of mental derangement,
before sinking into a coma that lasted more than three months. On waking, like
Mihai Patras, she demonstrated curious new aptitudes. She attracted the
attention of doctors in Edinburgh (then a renowned centre for medical research)
but as weeks passed she became withdrawn, and began to rave in what the doctors
took for delirium. Finally, she succumbed to a kind of petrifaction of the
viscera. For two days her doctors plied her with drugs, attempting to reverse
the condition, but being unable to find a pulse, pronounced her dead, whereupon
they conducted an autopsy.

The carving scalpel found her blood still
ran red. But by then it was too late. She remained a mystery in the annals of
Scottish medicine, until the pertinent records were lost to fire.

Case Three, and the last I will recall, was
an American named Carl Rossiter. He is dead, killed by the Imago, his gift too
dangerous.

His story began when a trek over the
Rockies with fraternity mates soured. An early blizzard closed a mountain pass.
While attempting to find shelter, Carl was struck a concussing blow by a falling
rock. He entered a coma that lasted a mere three days. Within weeks he entered
the chrysalis, but his friends, fearing they would be blamed, left him, hoping
perhaps he would be cleaned away in the spring by an awakening grizzly.

But Carl appeared again in society for the
time it took to exact revenge, before starting afresh with a new identity in
South America. It was in Ecuador that the Imago tracked him down and killed
him.

His was a most dangerous gift. He was an
empath. A creature so attuned to the emotions of others, so able to synchronise
his every reaction with his prey, that soon predator and prey were meshed like
gears—but only one gear supplied the torque. Let your guard down for a moment
and an empath could dance you over a cliff. And you would wear a smile all the
way down.

In each of Clotho’s cases, the subject
stumbled upon the change by chance. Other cases told of direct intervention by
the Imago.

The final case Clotho offered was himself.

For proof he directed my attention to the
very machine by which we were communicating. It was his design, the product, he
claimed, of a sublimated mind. A machine for automatic, word-level,
context-sensitive ciphers on a large vocabulary, and a generation ahead of the
state-of-the-art in use in the war. The Enigma was a toy by comparison, and
already cracked by the Poles and then the British. (Knowing Enigma was cracked
didn’t alarm me, which serves to show how disconnected I had become from my
previous passions.) Further, he claimed his design was a mere trifle, an
afternoon’s thought-caper, for the mind of an Imago with a suitable gifting. A
mind like his.

I pressed for detail: how is the change
invoked? What concrete gifts does it obtain? Who are the Imago?

He said the pathway to the change is no longer
open to the natural organism—if it had ever been. It is a watercourse that must
flow uphill. It needs help. It is a dry forest requiring an igniting spark, and
regardless of whether that spark is hand lit or lightning-borne, the result is
conflagration. He contrasted it with turning a crocodile’s egg, a motion that
for the embryonic creature brings death, for us life. But that movement must
come from an outside agency.

That agency, for most cases, is the Imago,
gatekeepers to the process of change, initiates of a new Gnostic sect; keepers
of the sacred flame, and priesthood of a new religion.

And they guard their secret jealously.

He would say no more than that the
procedure was imprecise, involved pharmacological and physical intervention,
and was not guaranteed. The requirement for drugs did not surprise me. The body
is a factory for countless drugs. Neither did the need for physical
intervention surprise me. I’ve splinted many sundered bones. What scared me was
the possibility the process could misfire, to cause a shattered mind or body.
The image loomed in my mind of the Elephant Man.

He asked me outright if I wanted to, as he
called it,
elevate
.

I suspected this was the choice the fox
offers the chicken.

I demurred, saying I wanted time to
consider.

He said, don’t take too long.

I had made my choice: thrice times yes! But
first I wanted to know more. To a caterpillar invariably come wings, to a
tadpole legs, to a wasp nymph a sting. But if I was to change, I had to know
what would be the outcome. What would be my gifting? And could I effect it? If
I set the fire just so, would it burn to a pre-ordained flame?

I returned to the cases Clotho had cited
and in a fever began to search in the Mundaneum’s library. I found what I was
looking for. Although the original documentary evidence had vanished from the
face of the earth, its trace there remained.

I began with Mihai, the one accused of
being a vampire. What could I discern of who he was before his change, and what
he was after?

I worked backwards, beginning with his
escape from the grave. The account protested he had not been dug up, but had
burst from the ground by his own power. Which meant, if Roumanians dealt with
their dead like their brethren of Christendom throughout the continent, a
coffin and six feet of entombing sod.

My conclusion: Mihai’s gifting had been
overwhelming, super-human strength.

I sifted more evidence, attempting to peer
through the veil of his rebirth to what kind of man he had been beforehand. Had
he been particularly strong? A trait naturally his, and simply amplified by
rebirth?

If anything, the evidence pointed the
opposite direction. Mihai had been weakened when young by a wasting disease,
which left him barely able to scrape together a living for his family. Indeed,
destitution had provoked the fight over the distribution of his uncle’s estate.