Dark Matter (2 page)

And found it moving fast.

On reflex he was already retreating when
the boy lunged.

He saw the screwdriver flash in an arc. He
traced its path high and wide of him and was surprised when a fist struck his
face. His cheek lit with pain, and he caught only a blur of motion in his
peripheral vision as the punch carried through, and the boy’s chest shunted
into him, knocking him backwards and sideways into his car.

Their bodies parted, and Rasputin took his share
of momentum. He slid down his car’s rear panelling and out into the throughway―straight
into the path of an oncoming car. The boy disappeared, drowned in the darkness
beyond the car’s lights.

Behind the wheel of the gleaming Valiant ‘68,
Eric Hewitt saw nothing. Nothing but the smug face of the teen at the movie
ticket counter, and the image of the concession card Eric had left on his
kitchen bench at home. He had fumed, run the sums, and decided there was time to
drive home, get the card, drive back, scold the teen, and still catch the last
trailers.

Rasputin, sprawled at knee height, saw
straight into the Valiant’s right headlight. His head collided with the car at
the point where the headlight rim met the grille. The impact caused a cranial
quake that created a new continental plate in the dome of his skull.
Capillaries ruptured and spewed a mist of blood billowing over the surface of
his brain.

The injury sparked off the natural response
of the organism: COMA. The kill signal stormed through his nervous system,
culling every non-essential activity.

But something else occurred while that
storm raged. Deep in his brain, the most complex organ known to man―a few
pounds holding more mystery than all the galaxy-whorled space of the Universe―a
demiurge awoke.

Deep in the dark, quiet centre of Rasputin’s
brain, threads of electrical current waved and arced like fingers of a luminous
hand. The hand lived between nanometres and microseconds. It reached from the
city of lights that housed his memory and longings, and into a place that had
been dark since birth, and blindly alighted on that dark matter. A finger, a
tendril of flame caressed the dark place. The hand flinched back once as if
stung, then dove forward and grasped flesh. The fingers swelled and became
conduits of light. The barren place began to stir with life.

Before consciousness slipped away, he was
struck by a random thought. Why his drowning mind chose this thought to leave
him was a mystery. Perhaps it was like looking for meaning in the beating legs
of a dying cockroach.

This was the revelation: Jane Austen was
the author of Pride and Prejudice, true.
Red Saturn
was the imprint of
his tatty old edition of Pride and Prejudice.

His answer had been right. His brain had
simply judged the question wrong.

CAIN

I was born Gottfried Schürmann. I was
reborn Cain, one of the lucky few to walk again on History’s miscarriage-strewn
highway. I think you know my “brother.”

Before I kill you, I want to tell you my
story.

I say
lucky
, but luck is a phantom.
If I had trusted to luck when I woke from my ordeal, I would have perished
there in the dark, and made of my birth canal a burial chamber.

At first I had no name but
I
, and no
sense except of
being
.

Then it was as though this
I
put on
my flesh, put it on like one dons a winter coat that has hung forgotten in a
closet through summer. My flesh became engorged with a will.

And with my flesh came other senses. But
they told me only that I was blind, confused, in pain, and alone.

And still there was no name for this I.

Pain licked my body like fire. In that
instant the compulsion to tear it off and fling it away was primal.

Which is the precise point at which so many
have failed. Can you imagine how many have awoken to the same ordeal, their
consciousnesses rising from the deep of slumber like pinpricks of florescence
from the ocean floor, only to feel that first shock of pain, recoil from it,
and sink back into oblivion?

No. I am here—I am
Cain
—because I am
strong.

I really did think I was on fire. Then, as
I forced my mind to order, my senses righted and I realised my mistake. How
could there be fire where there was not a breath of air?

I felt a curious sense of inversion, and
then knew the fire was not feeding on me but
within
me. My lungs were on
the verge of collapse. I couldn’t breathe.

I've known men who almost suffocated. One compatriot
of mine told me how in Belgium he was caught on the upper floor of a townhouse
when a shell punctured the ground floor. When the air filled with smoke, panic
possessed him and reduced him to an animal. He beat against the windows and
bayed for rescue. His eyes told me better than his tongue. They had a vulpine cast,
and glared out at me from skin like melted wax.

Every man said the panic took over.

But not for me.

I had a problem: I could not breathe. The
solution required a methodical process. I surveyed the map of facts to hand,
like Kutuzov or Napoleon, and ordered dispositions for my relief.

I soon discovered the reason I could not
breathe was a thick, elastic-feeling mass lodged in my throat. But when I tried
to pull it free with my hands, they barely stirred.

Was I sick?

Perhaps I was smothered beneath my bedclothes?
(I’m embarrassed to admit, but I called for my mother then.)

Stars began to appear behind my eyelids. I
strained my arms, and found that what held me was rigid.

I strained harder and the stars burst into
galaxies. The roar of blood in my ears was deafening.

Something gave.

My right arm came free. I tried to grasp
the thing in my throat but was baulked by the same tough binding that had held
my arm. A membrane sealed my mouth.

As I scrabbled for purchase, my left arm
tore free and joined in.

Now the stars behind my eyelids began to
fall. My lungs were hotter than a smith’s forge, and my mind was beginning to
fragment under the strain. One shard wondered if I might take a hammer to
whatever was stuck in my throat and fashion a sword from it.

At last, wet and thick and heavy, it came
free. It slithered from my throat with a sound, I imagine, not unlike the
plunging of a root-clogged drain. I lay there gulping air like water till
hunger began a fresh blaze.

Hunger. I remembered what that felt like. I
knew what to do with it—feed it bread, cheese and sausage. I remembered their
smell. I remembered the feel in my hands of a coarse loaf, to be torn open and
shared with friends.

Friends. I had known some of those too.

Memories broke over me like an avalanche.
Each memory fragment was a link in a chain that joined others. Soon I
remembered Gottfried Schürmann.

I had finally recovered my name, I thought.

That was exciting. Like waking one morning
thinking it is Monday only to find it is Saturday and a foot of powder has
fallen in the night.

 
But
as my memories continued to coalesce, I realised my mistake. Gottfried
Schürmann was dead.

Well, I have no precedent for that rapture.

I tore the last of the tough, fibrous
shroud from my face, and rose Cain.

I sat up and sneezed. I had been lying on a
trestle table, and the air was laden with dust. I peered into a dim room; I had
no memory of this place. A faint band of light leaking beneath a door revealed
a clutter of objects that put me in mind of an attic, but there was no window.

When I planted my feet on the floor to
rise, I realised how weak I was. And naked.

Later, as I hunted for clothing and tried
to determine where in the world I was, I recalled something that dented my joy.

I refer to the visions spruiked to me, when
I still bore the name Gottfried Schürmann, by our scientists and futurologists—the
Reich’s
, the Americans, all of them.
I don’t mean the flashy, fast contraptions, and the monoliths; the Douglas
DC-3s and Rockefeller Centers, and bombs guided by invisible beams. No, what
angered me was their pontificating about technologies of the flesh: soldiers able
to march for days in freezing cold without food (they said); reflexes fit for
jet-propelled flight (they said); farms where organs could be harvested like
corn; genetic therapies enabling a man to live two hundred years.

At all of these they had twice failed.
Failed to achieve, and failed to dream. Even the novelists had failed.

I was outraged. They had lied, every one of
them. Sinned the sin of omission.

I knew, on waking, they were culpably
short-sighted
.

Cain knew so much more was possible.

You’re looking at it.

A PSI TURN

Some comas last minutes.

Others never lift. For those, the soul
sleeps, a dead letter, entombed in flesh that the years turn yellow, until
somebody decides not to pay the electricity bill, and turns out the lights.

And then there is everything in between. On
the 2nd of June, 2007, BBC News carried the story of Jan Grzebski, a Polish man
who lapsed into a coma after being struck by a train. His bowels went on to
process queued food rations and then waited. He woke nineteen years later to
his wife’s tearful, smiling face, and streets and shop shelves engorged by
capitalism.

Rasputin’s coma broke precisely six days
after it began, to the second. His eyes snapped open. He saw the silhouette of
a woman standing by a window.

He said: “My head hurts,” and fell into a
deep, dreamless, normal slumber.

He woke the next morning to see the sun
spilling blinding light through the same window. His eyelids flickered against
the blaze as he fought to keep them open. Through them he saw heavy drapes,
bare walls, and, hanging over the end of his bed, a TV.

He was quietly confident this was not his
bedroom.

“So it’s true,” said a voice from the other
side of the bed. “The dead do rise.”

Rasputin turned his gaze that way and
hunted in the relative gloom for the voice’s owner. He found a nurse, young
with close-cropped blond hair.

She smiled and said, “How do you feel?” As
she rounded the foot of the bed to draw the curtains, he sensed she was hiding
excitement beneath a semblance of routine.

How do I feel?

Apart from a tightness at his right temple,
his head felt starkly clear. Crisp, without even a ghost of static.

The nurse tugged the curtains together then
came to the bedside. She checked a bag of fluid hanging from an IV stand, and
then fixed him with unblinking eyes.

“Do you know who you are?” she said.

“The Queen of England,” he replied. “Mind
the corgis.”

She smiled. “What’s your name, Your
Majesty?”

He sighed, said, “Rasputin T. Lowdermilk,”
and couldn’t suppress a grimace. He had long since forgiven his parents his
first name, and couldn’t blame them for his last. The T was nice. Perhaps he
should ask to be called Mr. T.

“And what year is it Rasputin T.
Lowdermilk?”

“I don’t know what year it is, but it must
be the Last Day. For angels walk the earth.”

He kept a straight face for a moment,
before a snorting laugh opened his mouth. But in that instant pain lanced his
temple, making him gasp. He tried to lift a hand to his temple but found it
weighed down by the IV drip. He tentatively lifted the other to where he
thought the pain was, but his fingers met only the coarse texture of bandage
rather than skin.

“You’ll have a nice scar there,” she said,
and guided his hand away from his head.

“Wonderful. Now it’ll be Harry Potter
references.”

The nurse shook her head, surprise in her
eyes. “You’re in a good mood for a guy who nearly died.”

“Don’t tell me that,” he said. “I thrive on
ignorance.” He tracked her with his gaze, wondering if she’d bought the
bravado.

She retrieved a clipboard from the end of
the bed and became engrossed in it. Either she was a slow reader, or whatever
was written there was requiring some heavy decoding. Her tone, when she finally
spoke, wanted to be conversational.

“You’ve been in a coma.”

Coma. It sounded so soap opera.

“What do you remember?” she said.

His mind groped back over the coma’s black
void to dim shores. No, not dim. Light! The world had been suffused with light.
For a moment he thought perhaps he had dreamed after all. Then he tasted
sweet-and-sour pork. It was the spark, and total recall engulfed him like fire
a dry bush.