Dark Matter (49 page)

Rasputin’s blank exterior masked a frenzy
of thought. He hunted for something to stall Cain, some spanner to throw into
the cogs that threatened to grind him to nothing. But every alley turned blind.
His own mind was becoming Cain’s advocate. Why bother, it whispered, he is
omniscient. He will have thought of it, covered it. You are smothered in web.
You just don’t know it. Be still and preserve the dignity of the dying.

Cain swept the alcove with his gaze, the
vaulted ceiling of the hall, and lastly the wheel of stained glass, and the
stars aflame beyond it.

“It is an evocative scene, a good place to
die.” He spoke as connoisseur savouring a vintage, an artist judging a composition.

The tone of his voice, its tremulous
ecstasy, sparked Rasputin’s memory. He had heard that same tone, those
inflections, at moments during Cain’s telling of his story in the lab―when
panic had ebbed enough for him to attend to it. It had been woven through his
monologue, dipping in and out of the mundanity and brutality, to glint like a
golden thread through a pauper’s mat.

This fervour―this
mysterion
―had
surfaced most clearly in Cain’s brief account of his visit to the bank in
Zurich, to a safety deposit box. He had taken a man’s life as a pretence just
to fondle a painting―he had admitted as much.

Cain came a step closer. Rasputin smelled
his sweat in the dusty air.

Rasputin could not reconcile this
man-thing, blood fresh on his hands, with the aesthete his voice betrayed.

“You sniff at the Imago and their games,”
said Rasputin, “but what will you be doing on that Sunday afternoon a decade
from now?”

Cain halted. He straightened his back and
hooked his lips in a half-smile. His right hand reached to grasp his chin in
the fork of thumb and fingers. The hand bore a dark stain, and he winced as he
stroked his cheek.

“Good. Good,” he said, and Rasputin felt
the burn of that gaze now appraising him. “That’s the real question isn’t it:
What is worth one’s time? Not just today or tomorrow, but for Eternity. What is
worth one’s sustained scrutiny? One’s intellect? Loyalty? Labour? Love? What
will bear the flame of their focus, and, under it, neither diminish nor be
consumed?”

“Yes, what?” The words burst from Rasputin
in a geyser. He could not stifle them, nor hide their iron-hard sincerity.
Tears stung his eyes―
not now! Not here!

“See,” said Cain. “I knew you were a
kindred spirit. Fit brother for me.” He said it with unfeigned kindness.

He glanced again at the window, as if
reading the time there.

“I must go. Your friend won’t find it so
easy to free Jordan from his bonds. They were intended to last. But I will not
leave too much to chance. His escape would be a tiresome mess to remedy.”

Rasputin tensed.

“But, to your question, my provisional
answer: during the war, many artworks passed under my nose in my role with the
KunstSchutz. It was a heaven for an art historian, for one concerned to trace
the expression of man’s most sublime thoughts, and struggles to express the
inexpressible: to capture eternity in time. One piece gripped me like no other:
Bacchiacca’s interpretation of the myth of Leda and the Swan. The story goes
that Zeus, in the guise of a swan, seduced Leda and raped her. By him she bore
five eggs. The painting depicts her five sons amidst a wreck of eggshell, and
behind them, Zeus-as-swan taking succour from Leda’s breast. ...and Leda.”

Cain’s breath caught. He was gazing again
into the heavens.

“I stole it, had it diverted before
reaching Goering, who had ear-marked it.”

Cain returned his gaze to Rasputin.

“Imagine my surprise then to find that
painting hanging in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, sixty-odd years
after having first laid eyes on it. No, I did not quite tell you all that has
transpired in my life these past months. I awoke a kid in a candy store.”

Cain reached across his body into his
pocket with his left hand, and from it pulled a handkerchief. He dabbed his
eyes.

“Leda was captured by the Americans where
she lay in storage in a subterranean salt mine at the end of the war. The
museum knows of the painting’s shadowed provenance. When I found it, I sat
beneath it for hours. I sat beneath her like one of her sons.” He chuckled in
reminiscence. “I have often put myself in the picture, as the son who sits at
his mother’s feet. But that son is blind. Half of his shell sits upon his head
like an over-sized hat. He sits in the presence of profound beauty, but all he
can see is what he has ever seen: the inside of his shell.”

“Is that your answer?” said Rasputin: “A
woman?”

“A woman?” Cain scowled. “No, not
a
woman:
every woman.” He shook his head violently, as though arguing with
himself.
“
No, not every woman
:
whatever it is that shines but
rarely, imperfectly, in the face of a woman―and even there, dies, vanishes in a
moment. The most sublime art captures but its trace, this presence that
obtrudes into our rude existence with its―” His shoulders hitched, his hands
became claws “―
beauty?
I lack even a word for what would be worthy of
worship for all eternity.”

His shoulders slumped as the tension left
him. “If only I could find it... and hold it.”

“That flame of yearning,” said Rasputin,
“burns in every man. Not just you. Someone I knew called it
Par Inust
:
the Burning Within.”

“That is incorrect,” said Cain. “Your
friend failed to construe his Latin, but perhaps he spoke better than he knew.
It should be in the past tense.
Par Inust
is Burnt Within. And no, not
everyone is burnt within. A precious few, in fact. But we are.
”

Cain appeared to return to the moment. “You
see now that my quest for immortality, predicated on ultimate adaptability, is
but a necessary condition to the real search. The search for unquenchable
meaning.”

“I do see,” said Rasputin. “But I cannot
let you continue to pursue it at the cost of others.”

Cain tilted his head and squinted. Rasputin
saw again in his face the cruelty that wonder had momentarily eclipsed.

“Who will stop me? Certainly not you―you, a
boy, and a cripple.” Cain tensed and coiled to strike. “Come. Let’s have done
with it. I want to know if your neck is a
pop
or a
snap
.”

Rasputin flung the gun at Cain’s face, and
while Cain raised an arm to ward it off, grasped his pocketknife and flicked it
open. He brought it up before him.

The gun had struck Cain a glancing blow. It
deflected from his forearm and clattered down the stairs leading to the
undercroft, and was lost in the gloom.

When Cain’s eyes fixed on him again, he saw
the knife in Rasputin’s hand. He barked laughter.

“You going to stick me with that pin?” he
snarled.

“No.”

An idea had been for some time forming. It
had begun earlier that same day, when he had awoken from hibernation to find
nothing had changed. Then it had been merely the precursor to thought, an
inkling
―some
part of his mind worrying out of view like a dog at a bone.

That bone was the realisation that his
portal back into the world had been his sister, or, more precisely, that he
believed his sister to have forgiven him.

This fact had been let loose into the
currents of his subconscious, to be joined by another: Cain’s speculation about
what fuelled an imago’s transformation―their heart’s deepest desire.

Finally, upon seeing Cain’s marred hand―a
stain that persisted after his
changing
―the
idea had been birthed into his conscious mind. And he had seen its truth. All
his life he had been looking for an altar on which to lie.

Cain lunged at Rasputin.

Rasputin hooked his free hand around the
man’s back and hugged him with all his strength. Cain’s hands found his neck
and began to throttle his airway.

With his free hand, the one holding the
blade, Rasputin found his own ribs. He slid the knife across them, like one
swiping a glockenspiel, found a space, and drove it home.

The pain was like nothing he had ever felt
or imagined―it was so
deep
. It threatened to drive the purpose from his
mind.

He pitched forward, pushing Cain, and
together they fell to the floor, limbs tangled, Rasputin atop Cain.

A warm, wetness spread rapidly across his
chest. His heart was pumping the lifeblood from his body.

Cain went still, like a night-creature
tasting the first hint of danger on the air. Then he began to scream, and
Rasputin knew his blood was flowing out and over the man.

Cain’s hands left Rasputin's neck, and he
began to writhe, attempting to dislodge him. But Rasputin spread his weight and
bore down with every ounce of strength he had.

The screams rose and the sound swallowed
his senses.

Cain’s struggles reached a peak, teetered
there for what seemed an eternity, and began to ebb. His cries became wet,
gurgling and guttural.

Rasputin’s strength began to ebb too. The
pain had diminished until it was simply the reminder of something awry.

Cain became still.

Rasputin’s vision began to fail. He felt
warm. He rolled off Cain’s body, onto his back on the smooth floor. He arched
his head in search of the window. He thought he would like to see stars one
more time, even if stained green and red by the glass.

RASPUTIN

Rasputin had let the current take him.

It had swept Reim’s little craft near the
Narrows Bridge. But now he needed somewhere calm and out of the way of river
traffic. He raised the sail, drew the mainsheet taught and nudged the rudder.
The bow spun until it pointed at the shallow water near the freeway.

There was little wind, and few craft plying
it. He sailed to where the smell of dead seaweed filled his nostrils and
dropped the small drag anchor. An intense nostalgia assaulted him. He
remembered Reim.

He drew the sail in again, then sat square
to the bow, hands hanging limp over his knees.

It was five weeks since Reim had died. Five
weeks since he had nearly died.

He tallied how the world had changed in
that time.

Dee and Jordy were engaged. It had been a
long time coming, but events had served as catalyst. Only one thing marred
Rasputin’s joy at the prospect of his two best friends tying the knot
―the thought of giving the speech. Beyond
making fun of Jordy, which was almost a hobby in any case, Rasputin feared
hitting the serious note. He
’
d
witnessed the moment that had clinched it for Dee and Jordy on the safe side of
a lab doorway
―
it recurred all
too vividly in troubled dreams that were always lit a pale green.

Every
day, it seemed, prodded him with some memory of that night.

That morning it had been Sam, now a
full-fledged ASIO agent. He had first called to talk about the virus a week
after it had been stolen―not so sluggish for ASIO―having been assigned to the
task force investigating its theft because of his previous association with
Rasputin. He called most days, crosschecking a detail or testing a theory.

Rasputin raised his eyes to squint at the
distant shore, and, jutting above the tree line, the silhouette of Winthrop
Hall’s tower. Unlike the scene of his accident, he had no desire to ever set
foot again in the hall.

The virus had not been found, because Cain’s
lifeless body had not been found. Rasputin had awoken in intensive care
following their struggle to be told by Dee that he had been found alone in the
alcove, lying in a pool of blood.

Dee had reached Reim’s house quickly, but,
as predicted, had made slow headway freeing Jordy from steel bonds. They had
waited in vain for the police to arrive. What had arrived instead was a
telephone call from the security agency charged with care of the C2 facility.
The agency had been alerted by notification of repeated failed attempts to exit
the lab―albeit with a mysterious delay. They had called Reim as point of
course, and then investigated. Fortunately, the broken vial had been seen
before anyone had entered the lab.

In an aside, Sam had informed him that Thorpe’s
indictment was stalled. The surgeon had left Australia for the States. Sam
thought he intended to attach himself to a university there.

Rasputin’s tangle with Thorpe seemed so
long ago it lacked the power to frighten him anymore. He wondered what the
surgeon’s leaving meant for his brother, Joachim Thorpe, who still lay
flesh-bound in Shenton Park. He felt a stab of pity for both men.

He let his gaze wander along the shores of
the Swan. Cars sped, as always, along the road beneath King Park’s frowning
bluff. No one could reach him out on the water. He no longer carried a mobile
phone.