Dark Matter (45 page)

Then Rasputin’s body moved―almost before
reason, almost. He raised his cane, fought an instinctual revulsion, and swung
it at the old man’s skull. It struck just behind his right temple. He slumped
onto the desk, slid backwards, and fell to the floor like a sack of grain. The
pen clattered on the floor, a little coda.

Dee screamed.

Rasputin stepped away from Reim’s inert
form, surveying the effect.

Dee was breathing rapidly. It seemed she
couldn’t form words.

“That is not Reim,” Rasputin said. His
chest was hitching with fast, shallow breaths. He repeated it twice,
emphatically.

“What?” was all she could manage in reply.

He pointed at the serviette, perched on the
edge of the bench.

“Reim is
left-
handed.”

Rasputin looked at his own left hand,
flexed it.
Yes,
he reassured himself.
He is. We are.

“But—” she said.

“I don’t know how,” he said, and returned
his gaze to the man who was not Reim. “But I could guess. It doesn’t matter.
That’s not Reim.”

At last, Dee’s tongue began to work. “Where
is Jordy?”

Rasputin shivered. “I’ll bet he knows,” he
said, hoping it didn’t sound like a death sentence, and toed the man’s leg.

Dee bent over the man and dug in his pocket
for the gun. When she straightened up, it dangled from her hand as though she
was afraid it would turn and bite her.

“What do we do with this?”

Rasputin reached for the gun and gently
took it from her. He fiddled with the breach mechanism (it always looked so
easy in the movies) and finally succeeded in laying open the cylinder. Six
slugs sat in their chambers, awaiting the hammer blow.

Rasputin pivoted the gun and the bullets
slipped into his palm. He stared at them. He had never seen real bullets
before. Now isolated, each seemed no more dangerous than a stone.

He glanced about the room. He dismissed the
idea of slotting them one by one down a sink drain. Then he saw a one-way hatch
on the far wall. It was placarded with a high-contrast warning about what could
and could not be put through the system, in lists of acceptable classes of
hazardous substance.

He walked to the hatch. “These qualify as a
potentially hazardous substance,” he said, yanked it open by a metal handle,
and dropped the bullets into its bucket. They made a loud clatter. He slammed
the hatch shut and reopened it, just to be sure they were gone. The hatch’s
bucket was empty.

The gun was heavy in his hand. He
considered stowing it out of sight in a cupboard, but instead thrust it into
his pocket.

He turned, saying, “We need something to
tie him up,” and froze.

The man who was not Reim was no longer on
the floor. He was upright, one arm draped over Dee’s shoulder, the other poised
by her neck. In that hand he held the pen he had dropped when clubbed.

“Move and I’ll slot this through her
jugular. It requires strength, but is quite reliable.” He smiled a smile that
was an introduced species on the face that looked so like Reim’s. “The pen is
mightier than the sword, after all.”

“You’re probably disappointed I’m
conscious. I’m a quick healer.” As he spoke, the bruise marring his cheek
dissipated until the only evidence it had ever existed was a line of
rust-coloured blood.

The man pushed Dee into a chair, his eyes
on Rasputin. He bade Rasputin to yank an electrical cable from a computer, and
sit in the chair next to Dee. Rasputin complied, moving like an automaton, his
mind racing but yielding nothing. Next he instructed Rasputin to loop the cable
around his torso and Dee’s, and then between their legs. Finally he told him to
coil it round Dee’s wrists, and then his own.

As the man leaned to inspect the cable,
Rasputin sat up and swung his elbow sharply upward, hoping to catch his chin
with its bony point. He missed, and his momentum twisted him in the chair.

The man punched him deliberately on the
face. Rasputin felt hot liquid spring from his nose, and flow over his lips.
The man drew his fist back again and repeated the blow. The second impact hurt
his numb nose less than the first, and he drew a little satisfaction when the
man cried out in pain, guessing he had cut his knuckles the second time.

While Rasputin sat dazed, the man lunged
with feline speed, grabbed the cable and pulled it taut. Rasputin and Dee cried
out in unison, pain forcing the breath from them. The man cinched the cable
tightly, and secured them to a strut beneath the bench.

“There now,” he said, and wiped the back of
his hand across his forehead. He exhaled loudly, drew up a chair, and sat. “We
can talk.”

“Who are you?” said Dee, through clenched
teeth.

“Ah!” the man said. “Just the question.”
His tongue darted out and licked his bottom lip―another gesture incongruous
with that aged face.

He drew in a steadying breath, an orator’s
prelude. Then said:

“I was born Gottfried Schürmann. I was
reborn Cain, one of the lucky few to walk again on History’s miscarriage-strewn
highway.” He nodded at Rasputin. “I have called you brother.”

“Before I kill you, I want to tell you my
story.”

Rasputin listened as Cain told his
tale, and after the initial pulse of adrenaline at the portent of imminent
death, sat silently, absorbing it all.

When Cain had finished, Dee was the first
to speak.

“You said you’ve told your tale nine times
now.” Cain nodded. “Did you tell it to Reim last? Was he the eighth?”

Cain nodded again. “Yes. It has become my
changing ritual.”

Tears leaked from Dee’s eyes as she said,
“And Jordy before that?”

In reply, Cain’s face was full of mischief.
He rolled a foot closer on his chair and thrust his head forward.

Rasputin thought he meant to spit. Then he
noticed Cain’s left iris move―no, it didn’t move: the eyeball was fixed. The
sense of motion came from the iris’s substance. Its colour was changing,
dithering. Over twenty seconds, the iris altered from Reim’s slate-grey to
vivid blue. A vivid blue that in Rasputin’s world was the window on Jordy’s
soul.

Dee sobbed and hid her face.

“You’re a bastard,” said Rasputin.

Cain leaned back in the chair. The iris
faded back to grey.

“Of course. Surviving genes are bastard
genes.”

No one spoke for a time. Dee wept in
silence again. Rasputin thought he detected a faint buzzing in his ears, and
judged it an ironic time to discover he had tinnitus.

Cain slapped his thighs in the manner of
one having come to a decision, and rose. He picked up the serviette that had
sat perched on the bench since he had been clubbed, and approached the cube of
the wet area.

Its access way was a hermetically sealed
doorway guarded by another keypad. Cain entered the ten-digit code and the door
hissed and slid open. He ignored the orange suits hanging on the wall that
Rasputin could see through the doorway, and moved farther into the room and out
of view. The door hissed shut behind him.

He reappeared minutes later. In his hand he
held three vials. He pocketed two and placed the third on the bench, out of
reach of Rasputin and Dee. He then pulled something else from his trouser
pocket, retrieved the third vial, and, with his back turned, began to fuss with
it.

“What’s that?” Rasputin said.

“This lab works on some of the strongest,
most complex antidotes and vaccines ever conceived.”

A little knot loosened in Rasputin’s chest.

Cain went on: “The study of which is
provoked by,” he turned and lifted the vial up for Rasputin to see, “the most
abominable holocaust machines ever known.”

“That?” said Rasputin numbly.

Cain looked at the vial. “This.”

Cain turned his gaze upon Rasputin again.
“And to think, it was you who put me onto this little caper. You presented me
with the solution to all of my problems.”

Rasputin’s brow wrinkled in confusion. Then
understanding broke open like a boil. His retort died on his lips.

Cain saw it die. “That’s right. You and
your loose-lipped Dutch uncle. Tsk, tsk.”

“You’re going to kill us with a virus?
Seems a bit roundabout.”

“It’s not. Time is short―I’ve got to nip,
change, and be back―but I’ll explain it to you.”

Without warning, Dee spat at Cain.

He was startled. He raised his hand, and
Rasputin thought he meant to slap her. Instead, he wiped the spittle from his
face.

“Understandable,” was all he said, before
turning his attention again to Rasputin.

He sat.

“I told you the Imago don’t like changers.
We’re too dangerous. They’re hoping you’ll kill me. But when that doesn’t
happen, they will contrive some way to do it themselves. The only thing that
will stop them is a deeper danger. That’s where this comes in.” He held the
vial up again. Rasputin saw that he had attached a small metal device to its
side.

“This is the perfect genocide machine. I
beat that information, with the help of some expensive drugs, out of your professor,
along with his pass code. Imagine a virus that has a ninety-nine percent
mortality rate, an incubation period of two weeks, an airborne vector, and,
most importantly, no vaccine yet in existence. Imagine the fun we’d have with
that. Dropped in the right places, it could have pandemic reach.”

Cain gestured as if framing a scene. “Mary
arrives back in New York. JFK is a busy place―a hub for world-spanning travel.
Two weeks later, she leaves work early with a niggle in her chest. The flu
season has come early, she thinks. That night she wakes gripped by stomach
cramps.”

Cain seized his stomach, his features
contorted by a theatrical grimace.

“The following afternoon she is found by
her flatmate―dead, her skin a pouch for a soup of systemically failed organs.
The pathology is done, and the medicos realise they’re dealing with an unknown.
They quarantine. But the bull has run the gate.”

Cain tapped a finger against the vial. “How
many people could you infect in two weeks, death cloaked and stalking by your
side?”

He leaned back into his chair. “Pretty much
everyone, I’d say.”

“You want to kill the Imago?”

Cain’s eyebrows popped up. “What? No! Haven’t
you been listening? The Imago can buffer themselves well enough, hide away for
years, little nodes isolated from the social network that spans the globe.”

“I don’t want to kill them. I want to scare
them off me forever. I want to threaten them with a fate worse than death.”

“Which is.”

“Boredom.”

“Boredom?”

“Yes. Can’t you see that all of the Imago’s
power, all of their freedom, all of their interest is inextricably tied to a
world
peopled
. It is the bulwark against terminal
ennui
. They
play their games, and live whichever life of luxury or perversity they desire.
But they all, at bottom, depend on the toil of others. Without
others
,
they are no better off than the next man, than an animal in the jungle.”

He paused, his gaze became direct. “I
forget who said: Millions long for eternal life who do not know what to do on a
Sunday afternoon.”

Cain stood.

“There is one thing that intrigues me
still.”

“I couldn’t care less.”

“You should. It is your gifting.”

“My gifting?”

“Yes. What is it? My only fear in all of
this was that I’d encounter, at the last, an empath. That would have been a
tragedy. But you’re clearly not that; I’m not the one tied up.”

“Beats me,” said Rasputin, and the truth
stung.

Cain shrugged with genuine disappointment.

“It’s time for me to go.”

He placed the third vial, with its metallic
parasite, on the bench.

Cain indicated the metal device, “This is a
simple timer with a sprung mechanism. When the timer runs down in,” he moved a
switch on the side of the device, “fifteen minutes, a little hammer will strike
the vial―that’s 10:23 by that clock. There is a species of lobster that does
something similar when predating prey holed up in bottles. The contents will
disperse enough, I think, to infect you both. I daresay you will get loose from
that cable eventually, but it has only to hold for a quarter of an hour.”

He strode toward the door that led to the
outer lab. Before leaving, he pivoted on the spot, and pointed behind himself
at the glass door.

“That’s where the camera crew will set up.
I dare say they will contrive some way of giving you sustenance, but there is
no one in the world will let you leave this room. A televised death is perhaps
not what you had imagined for your future, but it is something. The Imago will
watch, and know.”