Dark Matter (29 page)

“But that must happen all the time. What
could they have got, anyway? What do you guys collect? Hobbies? Shoe size?”

“It doesn’t matter what they got. The
problem is what they didn’t get.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“Of the thousands of records the hacker gained
access to, he pulled one set: yours.”

“But—”

“It’s no good. I tried. They won’t touch
you with a barge pole now.” An awkward silence followed, and then, “I’m still
good for that beer if ever you make it to Canberra.”

Rasputin mumbled thanks and hung up. As he
did, the phone buzzed in his hand once, announcing a new message. Unthinking,
he called it up.

It read: On sale now at Sanity Records—The
Nutcracker Suite.

He turned the phone off and lay down,
wishing for unconsciousness.

CAIN

It might have been a gas giant that
enfolded my plane as we touched down rather than Munich Airport’s
vapour-wrapped tarmac, a wall of white, strobed by landing lights and
pin-pricked blue.

From the US I had headed home, Germany;
while it is a different wine that runs in my veins now, I still count it a
Deutsch
vintage.

I passed customs, where it appears the
Reich
lives on.

First contact came swiftly. The beagle, I
knew, had been a summons.

A chauffer was waiting at Arrivals with a
placard seeking Gottfried Schürmann. He escorted me to a black Mercedes S-class
limousine. He held the door open and I seated myself in an interior with only a
little less leather and legroom than Lufthansa’s First Class. He told me over
the intercom he had been paid for the whole day and would take me anywhere I
wished to go. I hunted for my own intercom switch, depressed it, and told him
to head for Marienplatz. The cabin fell silent and the tug of motion told me we
were in transit.

I noticed two things immediately. My seat
was warm. I assumed, despite it being before dawn, someone had recently
occupied the cabin. And on the seat beside me lay an envelope. I tensed,
fearing foul play. The envelope buzzed. I opened it and found a cell phone. It
was ringing.

As I reached for the phone, the limousine
cornered again, and this time I noticed the seat support alter pressure to
cradle my body. The entire seat reacted to the inertial forces of motion,
automatically by some pneumatic machinery. (Fitting end to the innovations of
Germany’s oldest automobile manufacturer: triviality.) I assumed, correctly,
that it was therefore a small matter to pre-heat or chill the seat to an
occupant’s satisfaction. Thus I dispelled the ghost of a drop man, and grasped
the phone.

I picked up the call.

A hash of white noise assaulted my ear, and
then I heard a voice.

“
Herr Schürmann? Cain?
” It was a
woman’s voice.

“
Ja.
”

“
Gut. Ein moment.
”

That same white noise stole over the end of
the woman’s speech, and when it subsided a different voice spoke, a man’s
voice.

“Good morning, Cain. Welcome back, and
thank you for accepting my hospitality.”

“Who is this?” I said, “And with whom was I
just speaking?”

“Clotho—and Clotho. We are all Clotho,” he
said, and laughed. “You must remember me?”

Yes, I remembered the name Clotho, and I needed
a moment to think, to recollect.

“A moment,” I said. With my free hand I
poured a cognac from the minibar.
Schnäpse für die
Synapsie.

A wave of static overtook the call, but
beneath it, just audible, the laughter continued unbroken until suddenly, distinctly,
it tripped up a register and again became a woman’s voice. Another unfamiliar
voice.

“Forgive me,” that lady’s voice said. “The
autobahn from the airport has many cell towers and many opportunities for me to
pander to paranoia.”

Paranoia:
that
clinched it.

I was speaking to Clotho, whose original
name was lost to the ravages of time. Clotho, a name borrowed from the Greek
Fates, the
Moirae
, who preside over the destiny of each life. Clotho,
spinner of life’s thread; Lachesis, measure-woman of the life-thread’s span;
Atropos, wielder of the blade that severs that thread.

This Clotho had taken the name as I took
Cain. This Clotho was the surviving dweom-mate of one who took the name
Atropos, it is believed. But the story of Clotho’s origins is woven from
rumour.

I know that Clotho, when asked by the Imago
why two names—Clotho and Atropos—had been taken from the canonical three rather
than a pair, as is customary, had demurred that one version of the Greek myth
held only two
Moirae
.

(One could speculate, were he a believer in
myth, what the death of Atropos by Clotho’s hand following the dweoming means
for Clotho’s lifethread. Is it left to spool out, forever unchecked by the
death blade?)

Paranoia.
If
there is a single word that characterises Clotho, it is paranoia. And as
he/she/it/they began to tell me, this call was being bounced through many cell
towers, under different voices, genders, accents, and occasionally, languages,
to stymie accidental or intentional surveillance. Clotho, I’m sure you’ve guessed,
had acquired a gift for technology, and was using it then to hide behind a
digital curtain.

I decided openness was the best policy:
“Should I be afraid?”

“You have nothing to fear from me.”

I had hoped this. Clotho and I had been on
good terms, or, at least, the best available in the penumbral world of that
coterie of Imagines.

But one cannot assume.

She went on. “I thought a sixty-year old
homecoming merited a welcome”—the voice slipped down an octave, like water over
faceted rock, from a twenty-something to an elderly man of smoke-ravaged throat—“and
a warning: they will demand you complete the dweoming ritual.”

I’ve told you I expected this. It did not
bother me, though I do not share their compulsion for that ritual.

“Thank you,” I said.

I desired to probe at my true concern:
“What reception should I expect?”

There was silence on the line. When Clotho
spoke again, the voice came for a moment as through a fan, ribbed and baffled,
before it cohered into a child’s.

“Some will be interested in your, ah,
prophetic
abilities—shifter desired, shifter become.”

The statement sent a shiver down my spine,
but in and of itself it was no admission of knowledge. I brushed the thought
aside. There was nothing I could do about it in any case. I had been summoned. I
would appear.

Clotho giggled and hung up.

I pressed the intercom and spoke to the
chauffer. “Where are we?”

“Approaching the E52 ring road, sir. If I
may presume to direct your attention to the navigation monitor above the
console to your right.”

I looked, and, as indicated, there sat a
small screen displaying a map of greater Munich. The map was centred on a red
dot, which I assumed to be our position. We were indeed approaching the
bisecting line of the E52.

“Who else knows our position?”

“Sir?”

“The intelligence indicated on this map—who
else knows it?”

I believe he stifled laughter at that. When
he spoke again, his mood frayed his professional facade.

“That’s the GPS Sat Nav. The car reads a
signal from a satellite, like a radio I guess, and plots our position. It can
be used for fleet management, but we don’t send the information anywhere: we
pride ourselves on client privacy.”

I bade the chauffer take the ring road
until further notice. We duly swung off
Kreuz-Munchen Nord
and began to
circle the city. You would think I would have been chomping at the bit to get
out of the enclosed space, off my derrière and into the fresh air, but the car’s
motion was soothing and conducive to thought all at once. Maybe it was the
second cognac begun to work.

When at length I had the chauffeur drop me
at Marienplatz, I felt my plans were well in order. I checked into the hotel I
had booked while in transit, and strode the perimeter of the square in search
of a foaming stein.

On returning, the concierge informed me a
telegram had arrived for me, under the name Finchley, the passport I was
currently using. I took it to my room and opened it.

It read: REQUEST YOUR COMPANY STOP STEPHEN
WC MATIN III STOP

No dead dogs this time, but the missive
still annoyed me. Translated, it was a command to be at St. Stephen’s
Cathedral, Vienna, in the war chapel beneath the building, at Matins on the
third of the following month. That was less than a week away.

I booked a train for Zurich under another
name—no passports necessary within the EU, happily—and in the meantime
attempted to initiate contact with Clotho.

I had no luck with Clotho at that time.

Zurich was a personal indulgence under the
guise of tactical necessity. I first found a suitable Swiss identity for the
onward trip to Vienna, and then visited one of my safety deposit boxes in the
Suisse
National
, accessed under the number and password protocol I had specified
so many years before. I was overjoyed to find within, shrouded and snug, and
looking as though it had only just been left, a little Renaissance portrait of
dubious provenance. The light was poor, and sadly I could not take it with me.
But I gave it an hour of my devotion and was amply rewarded. My memory had not
falsely augmented its virtue.

I arrived in Vienna on the third, and took
the subway from the Hauptbahnhoff to Stephensplatz. I ate dinner at McDonald’s,
which I have discovered agrees with my palette, and waited for the day’s light
to fail.

Stephensdom, once the tallest structure in
Europe, still takes my breath away. I watched her as night fell, and only half
the stars came out. The rest were blotted out by the cathedral’s vast roof. It
was different to when last I’d seen it. It is now diamond-patterned in glazed
tiles of primary colours, a canvas for the largest Mondrian in existence, and
within their weave, Habsburg eagles are resplendent and staring into the past
at a now-faded glory. The original roof was burnt when looting broke out at the
approach of the Russians at the end of the war. But its sheerness, so steep
snow rarely clings to it, what impressed me as a child, remained.

I entered and joined the few faithful, in
the hushed silence hunched beneath their favourite shrines.

A guard was set over the entrance to the
catacombs beneath the sanctuary. I approached and he informed me there was a
private function that night, the tour was not in operation.

“I am of that party,” I said, and gave him
the name of the American by which I had registered at the hotel in Munich.

He executed a deft bow and ushered me to the
stairway before returning to his post. His first instinct had been to salute
me. I saw the impulse rise before he resisted it; my eye is now attuned to such
miniscule movements. I doubted it was the church employing ex-servicemen.

As I descended and the darkness swallowed
me, I experienced a surge of visceral fear, the first in a long time. I
remembered who I was and conquered it.

The cathedral has an underground existence
impossible to perceive from above ground. It is under-mined by countless
charnel houses and ossuaries filled with the harvests of plague and war. I
squinted at one through a rusted cast-iron grate to see femurs stacked neatly,
end-on, like an ancient library of scrolls, each with a story simple but
powerful.

The war chapel is carved into the eastern
arm of the subterranean complex. I paused, yards from its entrance, when I
heard the susurrus of voices in conversation echo along the passageway. The
murmur was punctuated by the occasional bark of a raver.

I hesitated, then recalled the truth I had
armed myself with, against the contingency of second thoughts: to make an end
of it, I had first to be accepted. The only way to be free of the Imago was to
become one in body, spirit, and—what I lacked—
law
.

“Cain, welcome back to us.” It was Remus.

“Why did you kill my bloody dog?” I said. I
refused to let their script play out as written, like some fresh-faced
Hollywood protégé.

Remus didn’t buck an inch.

“
My
dog?” he said. “Which
me
goes with that
my
, shifter? Besides, it was an American dog. I thought
you would appreciate a parting shot in a long-cold war.”

“Dogs don’t own a nation,” I said. “Apology
accepted”—nothing in his bearing had indicated one—“I’m here. What do you
want?”

A snarl erupted from a man standing in a
corner of the room, and bounded back and forth in the small sanctuary. Its
owner continued to stare at the grit-speckled plaster as if it were the portal
to heaven. A raver.