Dark Matter (10 page)

Only a second had passed.

He wrote the answer at the top of his
sheet, Edmund Barton.

The studio exec spoke again. “Name the
architect of New York’s Guggenheim museum.”

Sucker punch.

He knew without looking up that a smile had
fallen from most faces in the room. He could hear them drop. But he was still
smiling.

He braced himself, and dived. He went
within
.
Like the prodded anemone, he triggered a controlled implosion. He opened the
Eye, and willed himself to its centre. He became Rasputin condensed, splinter
of himself, ghost in the machine, psychonaut, homunculus.

And a side serve of crazy.

He spoke into the vastness. “Who was the
architect of the Guggenheim?”

The eye gyrated on its axis. It sucked at a
constellation, pulling stars from an earlier epoch so close he would have
burned to a cinder had they been real.

A blue giant dominated the cluster, and its
name was
Ayn Rand
. It had birthed a star, a red dwarf that burned
angrily. And Rand had birthed a book,
The Fountainhead
. He remembered
reading it two years earlier, prompted by a lecturer proselytising Rand’s
philosophy. The book’s text bubbled over the surface of the globular memory
like pepper in tomato soup. It was all there. He could read it now, but he only
wanted the answer to the question.

He peered at the memory, searching for the
answer.

Two objects swung in ellipses around the
book-star, like planets gripped in its gravity well. One was the book’s angular
protagonist, architect
Howard Roark
. Roark was one half of a binary
system, a coupling of planets. The other was a real person,
Frank Lloyd
Wright
, the architect of the Guggenheim. Rand had denied that Wright was
her inspiration for Roark (claims and counter-claims floated like space
detritus about the planets). But it didn’t matter. Rasputin had found the name
he needed.

He rose from within, breached the surface,
and scrawled it on the sheet: Frank Lloyd Wright.

But there was no time for
self-congratulation. The studio exec fired off the next question. “What is the
chemical symbol for gold?”
 He wrote
Ag
on reflex, then paused. He
frowned at the couplet of letters. He glanced at the man next to him, who was
stretching his neck as though dodging bullets in slow motion, and when he
focused again on his answer, it irritated him.

There was nothing for it. Again he exerted
his will, and wrapped the eye around him like a cocoon.

He requested without words: Gold. The
sphere tilted and spun. It slowed when a far constellation drew level with his
gaze, and drank the distance in a single giddying gulp.

As the memory unfurled, he saw, for the
first time, faint, writhing tendrils of a glittering substance. They were
attached to the memory and curled off into the void surrounding it.

He focussed his attention on the content of
the memory, and recognised his Year Seven classroom. A blackboard was visible
from the view afforded by a three-quarter chair. Chalked onto it in a
ballooning script were rows of chemical element names and corresponding
symbols. He scanned along a row and struck gold,
Au.

Idiot.

He had to correct the answer. But this
time, instead of surfacing, he attempted to write from within. At first his
hands moved sluggishly, over-correcting, as though they were sheathed in
radiation-proof gloves and his pen was a fissile rod. The
Au
came out
like
Hv
, but he trusted it would do.

The next question was already coming, but
he was determined to stay in the eye. There would be no more trusting to
reflex.

The studio exec’s voice filtered inward
sounding like TV heard through a closed door, and he found he had to shuffle
his concentration from foot to foot, between his mental world and the real. As
time wore on he managed it with increasing deftness. The eye spun and gyrated
with his requests like a contested ball, but gradually a rhythm emerged; from
outside the question, from within its echo, then spin, and suck, and pluck, an
answer from the heavens.

He was master of every sight he had ever
laid eyes on, every sound he had ever laid ears on, every perception drawn from
his other senses and construed as memory. All of it hung somewhere in that
night sky, and an inner, invisible logic guided the ship of his consciousness
inerrantly through its vast distances.

He echoed Question 29—”What road lent its
name and image to a Beatles album?”—and in answer a pod of memory-stuff burst
open. In it he was seated on a familiar scraggy armchair. Jordy lay in a couch,
a bag-of-bones. A TV flickered with scenes from a documentary about the making
of the Lord of the Rings movies. In it the director was leading a procession
over the famous zebra crossing outside Abbey Road Studios, where the movies’
soundtracks were mixed.

And there was the answer to Question 29.

He wrote:
Abbey Road.

But he held the memory a moment longer.
This time his eye was primed. He caught the shimmer of elastic curlicues
snaking away from the memory into the darkness. They caressed objects within
the memory like things that see by touch. They licked, seeming to like the
taste of some places better than others, and where they touched left faint auras.
One fell upon the movies’ composer as he talked about leitmotifs. It coiled up
from his head like moonlit smoke.

But the stuff had substance. Its haziness,
he saw, came from the way it forked as it fell, in ever fainter, thinner
tendrils. They went on forking chaotically in fractal webs at the limit of his
vision. He marveled. He fancied the memory—every memory?—was not simply
anchored, but
enmeshed
in an arterial film of light.

He wanted to touch it.

But the studio exec’s voice came buzzing
through again. Now she wanted to know the second book of the Bible.

He stepped back mere hours to his hotel
room and the memory of the Bible he had leafed through. The contents page had
been visible for scant seconds, but there it was, vivid, clear—clearer than
real life, hyper-real. The answer was
Exodus.

Serendipity struck at Question 34: “Who
directed the recent Lord of the Rings movies?”

He almost wrote “Peter Jackson” from
conviction, but hesitated. Due process in the court of Rasputin demanded
verification.

He called for the memory of Boxing Day
2001, when he had sat in a sudden hush as a dark cinema became flushed with
light. Emblazoned on the screen was the movie’s title in heavy, gilded
lettering. He sat in the eye, an audience of one. He felt again a sense of
anticipation powerful as narcotic, as a fey elven voice prickled his skin. The
movie’s timeline was warped by the memory’s organism, played out of order. The
screen flickered, a name appeared in the same heavy gold lettering, Peter
Jackson. He had been right.

But he didn’t write it. Dense threads of
silver were anchored to the name, rippling like the roots of a sentient tree.
He was absorbed by them, cat-curious. He knew the filaments snaking away into
the gloom terminated in many memories. One was anchored to the face of the man
who owned that name in a memory he had already consulted.

Fear tickled his neck. But it was too faint
to heed.

On instinct he reached out and grasped the
gold lettering hanging in the black frame, itself framed by the inconstant envelope
of the memory. His touch crystallised the name, as if he had struck freezing
cold into the fluid memory. The name became cool, cast metal, rough to the
touch. He yanked it with both hands. It resisted a moment, and then with a wet,
inaudible rupture, came free. Its weight fell on his grip, and he staggered
before shifting to counter balance it. He laid it on its edge and squatted for
a better view. It had the feel of a long-lost attic treasure.

He was dimly aware of the girl’s voice
speaking the next question. He had to hurry.

He glanced over the name and saw it had
left a deep black void in the memory of that night. The silhouetted heads of
the cinema-memory beat spastically out of time, as if in ripping the name free
he had decapitated a cockroach. Into the violated place, silver tendrils groped
and waved blindly.

Silver thread had come free too, sticky and
clinging, like gizzard. A thick rope of it writhed inches from his face. Over
the name’s metal, tiny tongues forked and forked again, falling like lightning,
always in contact yet flitting over its surface to find best purchase. Their
play emitted a fizz that strobed to and fro across the threshold of hearing.

She was still speaking, but time had slowed
and become tacky. The man next to him was tugging an earlobe, and it took
forever for his thumb and forefinger to draw down and pull free.

Balancing the heavy metal with one hand,
Rasputin examined the tangle of threads reaching back umbilical-like into the
memory. He chose the thickest, the one terminating on the letter
A
, and
grasped it.

At first there was nothing.

Then a droplet.

The raw sensation of a single remembered
A
touched his mind. The A had an aftertaste of
hospital
, and he knew
it had come from the memory of a road sign.

The droplet became a trickle.

More ghosts of memory came down the silver
cord to sift over his mind like a light shower. Curlicues, and tri-strokes, and
puffs of breath that said “æ”. They fell from memories of books and signs and
report cards, and speeches and songs and shrieks.

The shower grew heavier as impressions
drained from a widening catchment. They began to wash over him and mingle, and
swamp his ability to separate and perceive them.

He felt the cord swell in his hand and
noticed it shone brighter than when he had first touched it.

He was on the verge of dropping it when it
juddered and wrenched his arm. It was as if somewhere upstream a lock had
opened and hammered the pressure in it. It blazed to a white-hot intensity.

Something new was coming down the line.

With horror he realised the downpour had
only been the vanguard, the first froth blasting through the opened gate.
Behind it was an inconceivably large cataract of sense uncurling, beginning to
force its ponderous body through the cord. He felt it coming, a subterranean
rumbling.

The cord would drain him whole. And fill
him again. It would pour the Universe into him. It would buckle the beams of
his mind.

He tried to wrench his hand free of the
cord but it clung to him elastically. With a shriek he saw it begin to fork
fractally and clamber over his hand and up his arm.

It clung long enough for the true flow to
touch him.

Behind the first impression
A,
a
chain reaction ignited.
Alpha
, then
first, single, alone, is—
they
tumbled over each other and each bloomed in a fresh payload of sense (Beta,
Gamma, Delta / Second / Third— Fourth— Pair— TripleMarried- DivorcedAndOnesilencedamintrical-
idegopsycheremit@er#@Iii_I...) Every bush, a garden, and every garden a forest.

Then the feelers snapped back like
overstretched glue. The connection collapsed. The flow died.

Silence. Sense. He lay sprawled in the eye.
He saw the name (Peter Jackson) sitting benignly again in its place, of one
piece with the memory of that night in the cinema, snug in its tissue of silver
veins, and floating amid others.

He understood. The venous tissue formed
associations, relating each memory to every other with some relevance, some
affinity. An infinity of affinities, even within his memory alone.

And ‘tissue’ was right. It was alive.

Only then did he realise why it was silent.
In the real world, he had fallen from his chair. He lay prone, and was staring
at a thigh draped in a red silk skirt.

He clambered into his chair, feeling his
cheeks flush under the combined gaze of every eye in the room.

The studio exec was unfazed. Perhaps men
routinely fell off chairs in her presence. She repeated the question.

 
But
as Rasputin’s embarrassment died he found he was trembling. Other questions
jostled at the back of his mind.
What if I hadn’t let go?
What would
it mean to be swallowed, assimilated by my own memory? Infinite regress?
Permanent coma?

By Question 42 he could read signs of
resignation all over the room. Some slouched, others sat bolt upright. One lady
gazed out a window that didn’t exist. A man he had noted earlier wearing
fluorescent pink board shorts seemed to have mistaken his pen for a pipe
cleaner, and subsequently his nostrils for pipes. As the question was spoken a
few perked up, “Which actress won the 2007 gold and silver Logies?”

By now Rasputin was grown so adept at
plying his new mental apparatus that he reached for the answer with the merest
flex of will. The act required the subtlest shifting of weight of attention
from out to in. More was his surprise then when he came up empty-handed.