Dark Matter (50 page)

The device had stopped working after
delivering its final communiqué. It had died following a brief period of decay,
as though it had reached its programmed shelf-life. When Jordy pried it open to
look for the cause of the problem, he found pink stains etched into its
circuits, as if some corrosive agent had burst within it.

Its last message had filled some gaps:

“
I
know what you are now, possessor of a most peculiar gift. But not one I need
fear, unless I am foolish enough to open one of your veins.

I have
let the Imago believe that you and Cain perished, each at the hand of the
other. Do not draw attention to yourself and they will remain unaware of their
error.

It was
necessary for me to remove Cain’s body. I’m sure you will evolve a story for
your authorities that is compelling, or at least confusing, enough to satisfy
them.

For the
record (although there will be none) I am glad you were the victor. Cain aimed
at a title that is mine: the ultimate chameleon. What he attempted to do in
flesh, I achieve in an intangible medium. In truth, he deserved to lose. He
used the tools of espionage, but did not stop to think―like the true spy―that
if a bug can be conveniently hidden within a bug, why not a bug within a bug
within a bug? (Even your friend, Jordy, noticed my splice-in.) It all made for
a great show.

With
heartfelt thanks and best wishes, C.
”

True enough, their story, though filled
with inexplicable holes, had finally been accepted. Or rather, it had been accepted
that they―Rasputin, Dee and Jordy―believed it. They had agreed to state that a
man disguised as their friend Reim De Groot had duped them. This was supported
by the lab’s security camera. The Reim-look-alike had escaped, leaving the real
Reim dead. Thus they had salvaged Reim’s reputation and come as close as they
could to the truth. Anything more would have seemed ludicrous.

But in the long hours of recovery Rasputin
endured while his body mended, his thoughts kept spiralling into one pit: what
did it mean?

Yes, he had gained the abiding ability to
access the inner eye. But in the intervening weeks, he had begun to feel its
poison, that which sent weaker Imago ravening in their minds.

He had entered the eye on a handful of
occasions for mere peccadilloes. And each time, its atmosphere had felt a
little more rarefied, like supercharged air. It had begun positively to
hurt
just to be within, as though his nerves were aflame from lack of oxygen.

This danger was trebled when combined with
how intoxicating it was to be within. The eye, despite being damaged, chaotic,
no longer driven by the purpose of calculating and effecting the change, was
still a marvel. The knowledge it had knit and would sell for snippets of one’s
sanity. Rasputin imagined the strain akin to waking one morning with an
addiction to alcohol and the taps running with beer.

He had steeled himself to leave the door to
the basement of his mind closed.

And sealed himself to his pledge by
divulging it to Dee and Jordy.

And yet...

He now felt the need for one final dip, one
more dive into the magic waters. Hence this trip in Reim’s yacht, to where he
could be alone and unmolested.

What did it all mean?

As he had lain in intensive care, and later
in a normal ward, he had listened to the machines hooked up to him. The
bleep-bleep of the pulse monitor, the occasional whoosh and hiss of the
automatic blood pressure machine. Each read his body for its life signs.

Lying there, trapped within circling
thoughts, he had formed an idea: why not read himself? Take the plunge, go
deeper than ever before, perhaps all the way to the beginning―and there read
himself?

No doubt the eye had continued reaching its
fingers into all there was of him. Its web would have drifted wider and wider,
and
deeper
into his past, in the complete archaeology of Rasputin.
Perhaps it had reached back to his inception.

It was worth a try. A final time in the
eye, he swore to himself.

He closed his eyes and quieted his mind. He
felt the sun warm his skin, and heard the lap of water on the boat’s hull. The
faintest of breezes feathered his hair.

The door to the basement of his mind stood
vivid in his imagination. He turned the handle. The door had been easier to
open each time he tried it. Perhaps if he kept at it, it would begin to open of
its own accord and suck him thither against his will, to rave...

He stepped over its threshold and entered
the eye.

Its atmosphere immediately crackled in his
ears and fizzed against his skin. A curiously delicious pain.

Staring up into the vault of his mind, he
saw nothing was as he had left it. It never was anymore. Celestial warfare was
waged while he slept, ate, and, he guessed, shat. Knowledge grew, ate old,
imperfect knowledge, and gave birth to new. But lacking a guiding hand, as
before the changing, the result could not be called ordered.

The dweoming tree had grown, dropped its
precious fruit, and now grew wild.

Rasputin set himself, and formed a command
never before given to the eye. He spoke: “Go back.” The command desired no
particular memory, no information, no feeling, but the past, as far back as it
existed for the one called Rasputin.

He staggered beneath the weight of the
drain on his strength. It was an energy-hungry load dropped on a fragile grid,
dimming the lights in blocks across his mind.

But grudgingly the flotsam began to flow.
Near memories―of today, and yesterday―the fastest, older memories more slowly,
layered in banks of parallax.

He realised with a jolt that it was not the
eye that spun. It was the entire heavens.

The whorling mental detritus began to part
over him and bend downward in a roar that made Niagara a whisper. The farther
from the eye, the faster the memory-stuff fell, until all had dropped below the
horizon, leaving only the most recent memories circling before him, spinning at
such a speed they began to blur into a ribbon of shifting colour.

The transformation continued, and the
colossal energy drain of extruding his entire memory into a kind of internal
geological column peaked. Pain lanced his head, and, casting a glance at the
real-world, he saw that his higher consciousness had blacked-out. His body must
be sprawled in the bottom of the boat.

All the while his mind continued to spin,
pressing down on him. He was a pilot banking at Mach-1, being flattened by jet-powered
G-forces.

“Go back,” he said again, the commanding
tone replaced by pleading.

It did.

Memory by memory, link by link, he clawed
his way down the chain of experience that dangled into his past, perhaps to the
inception of his being.

Wetness brushed his cheek, and he saw
twisting black feelers like waterspouts intrude from the eye’s walls, thick at
the wall and tapering in to a point. Each was a miniature of the vast spout
down which he travelled, and each licked his face with its point and travelled
chaotically over his body, tracing lines that left his skin burning in their
passage.

From outside the eye, through a hash of
unintelligible sight and sound, came snatches of voice and images he recognised.
So much he had forgotten. A boy’s face appeared and tumbled at cross-speed with
the vortex wall. To Rasputin he was a stranger, and in the same instant,
recognised: a friend from school whom he had forgotten ever existed. Rasputin
had played many times at the boy’s house. Its backyard had a cage for Newfoundland
dogs.

The burning sensation on his skin
intensified the further he fell, as though the friction of falling, a meteorite
in his own atmosphere, were goading his flesh to fire. He was a flame
travelling a fuse. Where he burnt was somehow changed, used.

He continued to slide down the mouth of his
memories. The wall began to change colour subtly. It drifted from its broad
palette, tied-dyed from every colour, into primary colours.

He felt in his stomach the speed of his
plummet slow, and then abruptly, as though a blind were pulled over the only
window on the sun, darkness.

He continued to fall still more slowly,
until he was drifting down in the dark, alone in a diving bell approaching the
sun-starved floor of the Pacific.

All was silent, save for a deep throbbing
sound. It beat rhythmically on the eye’s membrane. With every blow of the sound
front, his chest cavity resonated.

He smiled, oblivious to the fire licking
his flesh, wreathing his face. He realised where he was.

“More than I hoped possible.”

The rhythmic sound grew to a roar, as at
last he felt the eye touch down, and begin to settle. His body again had
weight.

He peered thought streamers of light
coiling from his flesh. They were the only source of illumination but served
only to deepen the darkness without. Elation at how far he had come ebbed and
gave way to a poignant sense of loss. There was, after all, nothing there. No
answer. No meaning.

For the second time since the accident he
faced the temptation to make of his body a grave.

Then a glimmer appeared.

It was so slight, he could not at first be
sure it wasn’t some trick of the eye. It was as the first paling of dawn, far
off, bringing the subtlest waning of the deep of night rather than the
intrusion of light.

Then, in an instant, he fell through the
floor of the eye and was immersed in a well of light so intense it pried open
his shut lids, and bored into every particle of his being. It pervaded and
suffused him. Destroyed Shadow. Laid bare.

In that moment, he feared the horror of
annihilation―not of the vacuum of space, the nothing, but of the crushing glory
of
everything
. He yearned to cower, to fold himself into a ball, but
could not.

He could not later recall how the words
came to him. Whether he heard them whispered in his ear, or carried them there
himself as he came dangling into the darkness in a cage wrought of his own
consciousness. Perhaps they had followed him down of their own accord, a tatter
of memory fluttering in the life-vortex’s tumult like a banner let loose on the
breeze―or the sole scrap to fly free of the burning house.

They formed a single sentence, and he clung
to it as though it were the point about which his being might coagulate and be.
He hid behind it as if it might shield him from the light he felt threatened to
rape him to nothingness like a wind-scoured dandelion.

It said:
I desire mercy not sacrifice.

A message of power and content.

Then darkness wrapped him again, and he
felt himself rising.

He heard the memory of his heart beat again
on the eye.

The vortex had ceased to spiral. The
entirety of his memory was fixed in a vertical gallery, past which he drifted
as he rose.

Only once in his journey did he pause. He
wanted only to be awake again, and in the real world, to forsake this too-rare
air.

What made him pause were more words, which
came like the first―which is to say he knew not how: “You no longer need this;
but here, a gift.”

He spun on the gentlest eddy to see a
memory collage drifting past him. Parts of it were familiar, but even those
were rendered new by their context―an unbroken tissue, clear and bright, no
longer disjoint, unordered, and unparsed as they had been for so long. Sun,
sand, waves. And a girl. His sister.

On instinct he tore his gaze away from the
memories, but not before seeing their crispness and beauty. They baited him. He
looked.

He saw and knew the mouth of the Blackwood
River flowing past the town of Augusta at the southwest tip of the state. The
river disgorged into the Southern Ocean, and in the shallows of its mouth he
saw his family collecting bait, large, bivalve molluscs—cockles.

Cockles: he smiled again at the
recognition. It was the word spoken by Temptation’s host on the day of his
accident, which had stirred deep waters that lapped against his conscious mind.
He had not known then that what moved in the deep was the memory of a sibling
he had chosen to forget.

And there she was, running along a fringe
of grass bordering the beach. Behind her, he saw caravans and tents cozened by
the drooping canopies of peppermint trees.

Again he saw her race past, tap his
shoulder, turn and laugh. He looked into her face, and detected the first
dulling of the pain that always lanced him.

Then she dashed behind the car, and he gave
chase, tottering after her on legs that barely fell quick enough to prop up his
tubby midriff.

The entire episode was there, connected and
whole. He watched, felt, smelt, and tasted the salt on the air over the
Blackwood, for the second time in his life.

As the time drew near, he steeled himself.
This
is a kind of penance
.