Dark Matter (7 page)

“Do I have a choice?”

“Tyrfing is a sword, from a very old poem
called the Waking of Angantyr.”

He recited:

“That would I have which I had yesterday;

heed what I had:

men’s hamperer, word’s hinderer,

and speeder of speech.

Aright read now this riddle, Heidrek!”

“Deep,” said
Jordy. “What does it mean?”

“It means get me a beer.”

Rasputin put the knife down, noting how the
blood on his finger had already lost its gloss. He lifted the cane and prodded
its foot at the brick, making half-past seven with his arm. He gritted his
teeth and hauled himself upwards, pushing with his free hand. He stalled
mid-rise and Jordy rescued him.

“Keep treating Barbara like that and she’ll
dump you,” Jordy said, slinging the flywire door back on its rails, and entered
the flat.

Rasputin followed. He slumped onto the
couch and muted the TV, feeling as though he had swum twenty laps. He told
himself he was unfit, but he wasn’t buying it.

Jordy returned with two stubbies. He gave
one to Rasputin and dropped into an armchair, twisting the top from his mid-fall.
Rasputin raised the beer to eye-level and examined the stubby holder. It was a
plastic replica of Ned Kelley’s helmet. He lifted the hem of his t-shirt and
twisted the top off the bottle. The seal broke with a sharp hiss and a mist
boiled in the bottle’s mouth. He took a swig. It was bitingly cold.

Movement drew his attention to the TV,
where hundreds of babies were floating in a cerulean sky trying to sell him
something.

Jordy was watching too. “I’m in the wrong
business. Imagine if clients came to me and accepted ‘flying babies’ as a
solution.”

“A few more beers and I’d buy from the
babies.”

Rasputin’s thoughts returned to the stick
laying at his side. “Tyrfing had a thirst, and was cursed to quench it no
matter the company.”

“A happy poem.”

“Once, the sword was drawn in the presence
of brothers.”

Jordy mulled this over. “I’m still pitching
for Barbara.” He had finished half of his bottle, and sunk lower into the
chair, all angles.

Rasputin felt compelled to explain himself.
He tried to remember the details of a murder committed with Tyrfing. A name
rose from his memory,
Hervor
. Simultaneously, the horizon of his mind
rolled, vibrating, as though someone had degaussed his head. He looked at his
beer suspiciously. He had barely dented it.

“A shield-maiden named Hervor had Tyrfing
in her possession,” he began, and found a string of words riding her hem.
“Hervor secretly gave her son the sword Tyrfing. While Angantyr and Heidrek
walked, Heidrek wanted to have a look at the sword. Since he had unsheathed it,
the curse the Dwarves had put on the sword made Heidrek kill his brother
Angantyr.”

“Where do you get this stuff?”

“Wikipedia,” Rasputin said, lowered his
gaze and sucked on his beer. “Last edit January 7 at 13:21. A million
contributors can’t be wrong.”

“A million monkeys, more like,” said Jordy,
then fell silent. Rasputin could hear his beer fizzing against the glass.

“You’re a mutant,” Jordy said finally. He
stood and left the room. It hadn’t sounded like the end of a conversation.

Presently, a voice floated down the
hallway. It was John Cleese’s of Monty Python fame, and it said: “‘Ello, I wish
to register a complaint,” the first line of The Parrot Sketch; Jordy had logged
into his computer. Key-presses and mouse-clicks punctuated the silence,
followed by Jordy’s murmuring. A moment later his head poked around the hallway
door.

“Tell me that bit about the brothers
again.”

Rasputin did.

Jordy disappeared again. When he reappeared
seconds later, he said, “I thought so. It’s word for word from the web page.”

Rasputin was dumbstruck. “Sue me. I’ll
footnote it next time.”

“Word for word, from a document you read—what?—nine
months ago, on the other side of a broken skull.” He stopped abruptly. His
shoulders sagged. “Wait. You didn’t just cut and paste it somewhere? Again and
again, got saturated with it?”

Rasputin shook his head, still wondering
where relaxed, beer-drinking Jordy had gone.

Jordy began to pace. The room was small,
and Rasputin wondered if this was what Japanese boot scooting looked like.

“I swear you did the same thing a week ago,
on the phone to Dee, the
whole
takeaway menu.”

Rasputin shrugged. “So I have a good—”

“Empiricism.”

“—memory—What?”

“British Empiricism. You visited that wiki
page too. It’s in your browser cache. What is it?”

Rasputin flushed. He was supposed to be
studying philosophy at university level. He had only checked the wiki for a
birth date.

“Why do you want to know?” Rasputin said.
“Not your cup of tea, is it. You can’t program a Briton.”

“Humour me.”

“Fine. In philosophy generally, empiricism
is a theory of knowledge emphasising the role of experience, especially sensory
perception, in the formation of ideas—”

Jordy cut in again. “Word for word.”

Rasputin couldn’t remember ever seeing him
this animated before.

Jordy turned to the bookshelf nestled in a
corner of the lounge room. He scanned it, then jabbed a finger at the lowest
shelf. He turned his gaze on Rasputin, and said, “Churchill’s History of World
War II. You read it last year, right?”

He had. How could he forget? He suspected
the dirty, jacketless tomes, which smelt of mildew, had given him carpal tunnel
syndrome.

“One doesn’t read Churchill. One chews
him.”

“Whatever. You kept quoting bits of its
preface to me. Do you remember it?”

“The whole preface?”

Jordy nodded.

Fine. Another test. He might as well ace
it.

But he wanted something more than the
answer, because Jordy was right to be reeling. The feat of memory Rasputin had
performed had been accompanied by a prescient sense of certainty. He had not
needed to wait for confirmation to know he was right, word for word. Fear crept
into his mind. Had he stumbled across a trace of Thorpe’s time bomb? Who knew
what feats a mind might perform if conscious of its own fabric fraying?

So as he framed the request—the preface to
Churchill’s history of World War II—he bent his concentration to observe, to
introspect, to espy his sleight-of-mind. To catch his thought in flight.

The effect of this scrutiny surpassed all
expectation.

He grasped the split-second in which his
mind went after memory—a process so fleeting it barely leaves a trace on the
conscious mind—and fashioned a world from it.

He entered that world.

He could not say whether his attention sank
within his mind, or if his imagination reached out to swallow him, extruding
into the real world like an Octopus’s stomach. He hoped, at any rate, not to be
bathed in the mental equivalent of digestive juices.

Colour whorled about him before the vision
resolved into a place. He was standing in a hall. Its walls were wood-panelled,
like those that connect rooms in museums and old libraries. The smell of
formaldehyde and mouldering paper mingled in the air. As he watched, a door
burst open and a clerkish-looking man appeared. The clerk wore a starched shirt
and suspenders, and pre-occupation wrinkled his brow. He scurried away without
a glance at Rasputin, fixed upon his errand: to find the preface.

On instinct, Rasputin, the Rasputin within,
sped after him and pressed close to his shoulder. For a moment he was faintly
aware of the TV’s flicker and Jordy’s sagging arm, before he focused his attention
on the nimble-footed clerk.

He was intoxicated by the familiar sense of
being embodied within his mind. It was so crisp, vivid, rich. His imagination
spared no detail as it manifest the process of sifting his memory in search of
something consumed in the past and put aside. The clerk’s footsteps ricocheted
from the walls, and his breath huffed. The smell of dust and archival fluid
grew heavy in the musty air.

The clerk searched backward in time, in
halls pocked by nooks lit by green-shaded lamps, Rasputin clamped to his side.
Other halls branched off at regular intervals. The clerk’s balding head tracked
their advance, and he turned down some without hesitation.

Rasputin looked beneath this illusion to
the reality. Time was orderly and linear. Days, weeks, months, years, all
packed together in known ways. And such was the route his little clerk
navigated. Straight halls, sharp corners, no-nonsense doors.

But no sooner had he made this observation
than the environment changed.

He noticed the clerk’s steps slow, and
suddenly they wheeled downwards on the steps of a spiral staircase. They were
plunged into gloom. He felt the smooth wooden steps give way to irregular rock,
and knew a moment of the sickly sensation of misjudging a step. Then light
bloomed again and drove the darkness back.

By the light of a flaming torch, Rasputin
stole a glance at the errand carrier and suppressed a shudder. Gone was the
officious little clerk. Rasputin had no name for what padded next to him now.
It had arms, or rather, limbs. With one it held aloft the torch, with others it
moved. But it wasn’t picky about which did what. A cluster of its limbs came
and went amid a shagpile of fur, now rising to grasp, now falling to stride.
Nothing Rasputin could see in the wavering light resembled a face, but a wet,
snuffling sound evidenced a nose.

After a moment’s hesitation, he thrust his
hand into the creature’s coarse hair and clung on.

The sphere of light bobbled to the
stairwell’s base, and revealed rough-hewn tunnels departing in every direction.
Their dark mouths gaped to the left, right, and centre, and covered the roof
and floor. From somewhere came the sound of water dripping, and other, furtive
noises.

Without warning, the creature shuffled to
the lip of a tunnel mouth and tumbled over its edge. Its hair slipped through
Rasputin's grasp and he plunged in weightless free-fall.

The shock made his heart hammer, and his
hands flailed after the creature.

For a moment his mind raced to understand
the implications of ending in a bloody heap in the bowels of his own memory.

Then his hand snagged a tuft of hair. He hung
on until his forearm burned.

Again the horizon swung, and he found
himself walking upright along the tunnel, leaving the one they had exited a
dark hole in the floor behind.

Soon the creature clambered up a wall to
another tunnel mouth. He let it haul him up, and on reaching the tunnel’s lip, felt
gravity self-correct again, washing away the drag of the old and leaving him
feeling buoyant.

Gradually he began to see method in the
madness. His imagination was mapping a new journey through his memory. Whereas
before with the clerk he had regressed in the rectilinear halls of time, he now
foraged in the twisting labyrinth of
things
, the remembrance of which
was a tangled web of connotation and cue. The clerk had brought him to the
storehouse of his mind occupied by memories of a time in the previous year. The
creature by his side now sought a path to a particular object, the preface to a
book entitled The Second World War, by a man named Winston Churchill. Finding
remembrance of it was not straightforward. The task required a bloodhound. He
had the smell of it, that mildewy, almost salty smell of old paper, and on the
strength of that lead they hunted.

The first quarry the creature unearthed was
the memory of a bag Rasputin owned. It lay crumpled in the dark by a tunnel
wall. A year before, the bag had carried books bought at a library sale, among
them Churchill’s history. He remembered its weight knocking against his hip as
he had walked to a bus stop. It had been peak hour, and the bus had been full.
He had stood, clinging to a rail for dear life while the driver flung the bus
around corners.

Soon the creature halted again, and
Rasputin saw, snagged on a rock jutting into the tunnel, a handkerchief. He
smiled, remembering how on the bus he had wondered if he should risk retrieving
it from his pocket, and whether the world was ready for it. A day of heavy use,
thanks to a cold, had left it sodden.

The creature strained forward, and was soon
slavering over a bright orange packet. Rasputin tasted cough lollies. He
remembered sucking one in bed while he read Churchill. He had torn the lid off
the lolly box for a bookmark.

With that realisation, they entered a room.
The smell of mildew was strongest here. He looked, and saw something lying on
the floor in the flickering light, amid a tangle of straw.

He had found the book.

“Good boy,” he said, and bent to retrieve
it.