Dark Matter (16 page)

Thorpe shut the door, and strode into the
gloom with an ease born of habit. Rasputin waited, propped on his cane, while
his pupils dilated. A hall emerged grudgingly from the gloom. Its walls were a
gallery of posters, some faded by age, containing more Latin than English,
depicting fuzzy tri-colour cross-sections of what Rasputin guessed were brain
scans. Each poster bore the impress of the Department of Neuroscience, and many
listed a Dr. Thorpe among their contributing authors. One poster his eye
happened across was a mere three years old. It credited two authors: a Scott
McIntyre and the Professor A. Thorpe. The work was titled: Analysis of the
motility rates of skull-anchored 50nm micro-electrodes in ambulatory patients.
It was English, but might as well have been Latin.

Thorpe disappeared up a flight of stairs,
leaving Rasputin to stump over to the lift. He punched the call button with the
butt of his cane and waited.

He rode the lift to the only floor above
and disembarked into a hallway that was a copy of the one below but for the
different posters that wallpapered it. A door was ajar partway along the
hallway, spilling light in angled shards across the floor and up the opposing
wall. Rasputin drew level with it, took a deliberate breath, and entered.

His first impression of the surgeon’s
office was of the sheer weight of clutter—the absolute antithesis of the spartan
clinic room. But before he had a chance to analyse this brute impression of
filled space, to resolve it into ground and figure, a lower part of his mind
yanked his attention toward an object that Thorpe threw at his face.

His free hand flew upward. Something
slapped into his palm, jolting his hand backwards as it absorbed the thing’s
momentum. He opened his fingers to reveal a ball of waxy substance.

“What the hell?” said Rasputin, as the
insult registered.

“Your reflexes are shipshape, which is good.
But your tongue is what my mother would call a loose rudder.”

“And what does she call a guy who takes
cheap shots,” said Rasputin, and wound his arm back to return the ball with
change.

“Uh, uh.” Thorpe shook his finger in a
stalling gesture. Even so, Rasputin marked the way the man’s knees shifted his
centre of mass lower, and he doubted he would be able to strike him, despite
being so close.

“Calm down. I was quite sure you would make
the catch, and worst case, it’s really quite soft. Take a look.”

Rasputin did. There wasn’t much to look at.
As he had suspected, it was some kind of wax. It had probably been white once,
but was now dappled shades of grey from dust and the oil of hands that had
worked it.

“You asked me why I became a neurosurgeon.
Well, I am that, and more. There are two breeds that study the brain:
neurosurgeons, who are surgeons first, and then specialise; and neurologists,
the armchair philosophers of the brain. But I took the road less travelled. I’m
that rare bird who is both at once. I first became interested in the brain, and
only later became a surgeon, out of necessity. I am like Henry Morton Stanley,
who was not content to ponder maps of Africa and talk of Livingstone, but was
compelled to toil in the continent’s heart in order to shake his hand, and
search for the Nile’s source.

“That wax you hold there had a part in my
story.”

Rasputin examined it again, but gained no
further insight into its significance. The urge to pelt it still lingered in
his arm.

“Surely you can see that you hold in your
hand a memory.”

A memory
–
the utterance made him want to laugh. The very notion of being able to hold a
single memory seemed each day to slip further into the realm of nostalgia.
Memory was
supposed
to come in episodes, wasn’t it? And those episodes
your mind chose to keep were supposed to be the stuff of daily life that jutted
out—from pain or joy or novelty—like a grown man pelting you with a ball of
wax. That was novel, and might have ended in pain but for his reflexes (which,
truth to tell, he was inwardly all warm about because they were firing nicely).
But his memory machine didn’t seem to care for episodes anymore. It operated
instead on the packrat’s philosophy of why chuck it if it might be useful some
day.

He felt like saying, ‘Yeah, I see this
thing in my hand. But you know what else? I haven’t had a good look yet, but I
bet I’ve also got the
entire
room
pegged. I could go home right
now and put all of your books, the 2129 books on the walls facing me, in
reverse alphabetical order. In my head. Or, shit, I could do Dewey decimal, or
if Dewey is too American for you, then the Universal Decimal Classification. It
was invented by a Belgian named Otlet (
Hello, Information Science elective!
).
Or let me just daydream a little and I’ll sort this library of yours by the sum
of the letters in their titles divided by the number of spanners in a Sidchrome
tool set. If I just watch and wait—there!—a little peristaltic movement beneath
the currents of my thoughts. Books begin to shed their weight. At any moment
they might begin piling off the shelf and swimming through the air. What a
machine. Oh my God.’

“Rasputin?”

Rasputin came to himself, realised he was
staring at the ball of wax. He glanced at Thorpe, thinking of the train of
thought that had just derailed. He had imagined saying it, but dared not.
Something was dug in deep and held his mouth shut.

Thorpe spoke again. “That ball of wax has
become a memory of your hand.”

Rasputin peered at it. The wax had been
crushed out of its sphere when his hand tensed. Shadow pooled in grooves where
his fingers had been. Even the creases of his palm were imprinted in the wax,
coarse trenches made by the muscles that caused his hand to cup, and the gentle
arcs of his life and heart lines.

Thorpe watched with eagerness. “You see?”

Rasputin shrugged. “Not much of a memory.”
He squeezed the deformed ball into a sausage that leaked out either side of his
hand. “This stuff makes the tabloids look like a Roman inscription.”

He tossed the wax sausage underhand to Thorpe
and began threading his way through glass-fronted cabinets and waist-high
tables laden with all manner of objects. The room was rectangular, and halfway
along its length vestigial stumps of a removed wall faced each other. Evidently
Thorpe’s office had consumed an adjacent office to grow to its present size.

But ‘office’ wasn’t quite right—the books
and debris made it a hybrid library-museum. He paused to lean on a stone
pedestal that supported a bust of something vaguely human. He read the object’s
caption—
Rujah, frontispiece from the Markaal temple
—and took a nervous
step backward. No need to add to his already overblown bill.

Thorpe roamed through the clutter, gaze
lost, roving over the collection.

“What’s wax got to do with all this,” said
Rasputin, burning instead for the answer to what it had to do with his head.

Thorpe looked up from a mechanical device
he held. He placed it back on a table, and said, “Nothing, but the power of
metaphor.”

Great
,
thought Rasputin,
The more I want from this guy, the more he sounds like an
Arts lecturer.

“When I said that wax is a memory, you
dismissed the idea. Rather contemptuously, I might add.”

“Sorry. It just seemed, well, low tech. You’re
a neuro-guru, after all. It would’ve seemed quaint, but...”

Thorpe raised an eyebrow, waiting for the
rest of the sentence. When it didn’t come, he finished it himself: “And I don’t
seem like a man who does quaint?”

Rasputin closed the distance to the
surgeon. Thorpe watched him come, drew breath, and raised a stolid finger.

“What impression did I make on you when we
first met? Cast your mind back.”

Rasputin knew no simple description for
what he had felt the first time in his presence.

Thorpe fired him a quick smile. “Never
mind. Keep your impression. But observe that our language is littered with
metaphors of memory.
Impression
, for one.” Rasputin began to understand.
“Ever had something
seared
into your mind?
Etched
indelibly on
your memory? Impress, sear, etch: all words that capture the idea of leaving a
mark on your memory, like the shape of your hand in that wax.”

Thorpe lowered the finger, and thrust it
toward Rasputin’s chest. “I guarantee you that the great men that strove to
understand the mind at the beginning of Western history—Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle—did not use this language to be
quaint
. They initiated the
greatest quest ever undertaken by man, to understand this three-pound mass of
flesh.” He jabbed his finger into Rasputin’s temple. “To understand how it does
what it does.”

He swung the finger toward the far wall.
“My colleagues of an astronomical persuasion, one building over, get all
excited by the discovery of a new galaxy. But I tell you, that’s child’s play
compared to unlocking the secrets of the human brain.”

“I wasn’t implying it was stupid,” said
Rasputin. “We stand on the shoulders of giants.” He knew. He had written an
essay on it.

“Better to say we
pimple
the
shoulders of giants. That goes for the great mass of humanity, save a select
few.”

Thorpe turned his back to Rasputin and
began stalking through the room. Rasputin followed as best he could.

“It is a curious fact that when men
struggle to conceive of the mind, they reach for the cutting edge of technology
for familiar concepts with which to describe it. Hence mud, then wax, take an
impression, and ‘remember it’, after a fashion.

“Following that dawn time, men borrowed
other objects from everyday life with which to compare memory. Some pictured it
as a cage of timid birds. Into this cage the mind plunges its hand to lay hold
of a memory. At times it plucks out the very bird it wants. At others, it
snatches a bird of the wrong plume, or merely feathers. And at still others,
the hand comes away empty.

“In time people compared memory to
subterranean grottos, riddled with dark, twisting tunnels, where experiences
were secreted like treasure to reward the questing mind—if it knew the way.”

Rasputin was watching his feet as he
navigated a chicane in the furniture when the room was plunged into darkness.

“But one easily forgets the way with age.
And even maps are of little use if we do not remember where we put them.”

Rasputin looked up, startled, but all he
saw was the fading afterimage of the cabinet he had been skirting. The darkness
was near complete, and into the silence came the throb of the blood coursing in
his neck, rising until he felt sure Thorpe would hear it.

Then he saw a faint nimbus of light blossom
in Thorpe’s hands. It grew and caught the underside of his face, staining it
green. The ghostly, unanchored face began to speak again.

“Fast forward to the 16th Century, and this
substance”—the green bloom dipped once—“was the cutting edge of technology.
Europe was aflame with the quest to turn lead into gold. It was the age of the
Alchemists. But not everyone was thrall to their spell. It was not hope of
riches that stirred Sir Robert Hooke, protégé of Boyle, when he saw what I am
about to show you.”

Rasputin could just discern Thorpe dabbing
a finger into his palm. The finger floated for a moment, a small green nimbus,
a will-o-the-wisp, and then began to write on the wall. The word it wrote was
obscured by Thorpe’s silhouette, an indistinguishable piece of the room’s
shadow. When he finished, he stepped away from the wall, and the word appeared
whole, glowing green, with a light intense enough to illumine the busts of dead
men arrayed along the desk below.

“Domini?” said Rasputin. More Latin.

“Yes, Domini. It means
Rule
. It was
the word used by the German, Johann Crafft, to impress Boyle and his
compatriots in the Royal Society.” He sniffed. “A party trick really.”

“This is Phosphor, of course. A philosopher’s
fire that burns with neither heat nor air. But Hooke immediately saw in this
strange substance a new and powerful metaphor for human memory.” Thorpe leaned
forward and breathed on the glowing word. It dimmed until Rasputin wasn’t sure
whether it lingered or whether his imagination was being mischievous in the
dark. Thorpe continued in a whisper, “For isn’t it just like memory to behold
the sun at day, and...” He paused, waiting. Then like a ghost galleon called
from the Deep by full moon, it shone again, faint but undeniable:
Domini
.
“...call it forth in the mind’s eye in the cold of night as one lies in bed?”

Thorpe threw the light switch, with a loud,
hollow
clack.
Rasputin jumped, his muscles having grown painfully tense
without him realising.

“But the best the Royal Society made of
this miracle substance, typically, was to invent a method of producing it that
did not require thousands of litres of German urine—which was Crafft’s method—so
they could parade their discovery around England and boggle the illiterate.”

Rasputin said, “I guess that means you
really don’t want my urine,” wondering, not for the first time, at the pivotal
place excrement took in all spheres of human endeavour.