Dark Matter (34 page)

“I remember,” said Reim. “Half of them died
in the first month. Dear little thing. Dee, I mean, not the spiders. I hate
spiders.”

Spiders, rats. Rasputin scratched the
mental note, and replaced it with a reminder to needle her about her
resemblance to Dr. Kevorkian, the doctor of death.

And then he realised there was nowhere safe
to go with his answer, and it was a long wade back to shore. He cast his gaze
up into the sky’s spotless vault and, for an instant, drew down the stars he
knew to be beating on that blue blaze with spindles of lonely light. He saw
them all, arrayed in perfect position for the time of day, waiting for night.

Then, with a faint pressure like a
compulsion, the eye sought to swallow everything, the bay, the blue, stars and
all, in its own fantastic sky, and make Rasputin the centre of everything.

“Not now,” he muttered, and steeling
himself as if for a needle prick, pushed it away.

He returned Reim’s clear-eyed gaze.

“I’ve an odd tale to tell,” he said, with
presence of mind enough to play at sea dog. “It began when my head was split
open, and since then I’ve come to yearn for something as mundane as
bloodletting.”

He went on to tell Reim everything that had
happened since emerging from a coma until that morning, when he had squeezed
silently into the back row of the lecture theatre.

Reim interrupted him twice. Once to tack northeast,
taking them back toward the freeway shore, which had drifted away as their
southerly course continued to pull Heathcote bluff nearer, and again, to jibe
on a direct course downwind toward Matilda Bay, their origin.

By the time Rasputin had finished, shadows
had tightened beneath the sail, and the shore had drawn near enough to make out
the park benches and barbecues that dotted it.

Reim regarded him, expression unreadable.

“And you want me to—what?—assay your
blood?”

“Yes,” said Rasputin, unable to gauge Reim’s
response to his brief history. “Dee thought you were working with blood-borne
biomarkers of...” He stopped mid-explanation, struck by the sudden fear the
idea was ludicrous.

Reim finished the sentence for him.
“Neurological disease. That is true, although my expertise lies more with the
animal than the human. My team is diverse... But surely a neurologist—”

Rasputin’s gaze dipped at the mention of
neurologist. Reim paused.

“Well, no harm in giving me a blood sample.
Visit the pathology lab on Broadway. It’s a collection point for our trials. I’ll
put your blood through our arrays, and see if anything turns up.”

“But do you believe me? Test me. Ask me
something. Ask me how many windows are in that apartment block over there,” he
said, jerking his head over his shoulder.

“Rasputin, you are either a liar, mad, or
telling the truth. I doubt very much Dee would have sent me a liar, and if you’re
mad, that makes two of us—the dish and the spoon.” He smiled. “Mr. Haemoglobin,
I believe you’re telling the truth, no matter that I find it incredible.”

Rasputin wanted to kiss the old man.

“But I would love to test you,” Reim
continued. “Not to reveal a lie. I’m interested in what you can do.”

Rasputin rolled his shoulders, laced his
fingers, and stretched them.

“Go for it.”

“Picture a chessboard, but one that is
initially white-on-white, and stretches in every direction without limit. To
this board add two players. We’ll call them the Angel and the Devil.”

“Spooky,” said Rasputin, smiling while he
formed the image in his mind.

“The rules of the game are simple: the
Devil’s sole aim is to trap the Angel. Each turn the Devil blackens one square,
which is henceforth cut-off from the Angel. The Angel can flee up to a fixed
number of squares each turn. Let’s call that number
jump
. The game ends
when the Angel has no white squares close enough to jump to: he is captured.”

“Got it,” said Rasputin, as in his mind two
figures, one dark, one light, faced off on an endless grid.

“Here’s the question: regardless of how big
jump
is, is our Angel forever doomed to fall into the Devil’s clutches?”

Rasputin gave the image of the grid and its
lonely-looking figures over to the brute force of his mind. His
sub-consciousness became fluid and crashed over the grid from every direction
in a flood that swept up grid, Angel, and Devil.

Rasputin was struck by fleeting images. The
grid extruded into three dimensions and become a maze. The Angel, trailing a
hand against its wall, moved through it swift as a mouse. Then cinders fell
like snow, and he saw the Angel feint back from a wall suddenly engulfed by
black flame—only to squeeze through an escape opening in the flame’s wake.

Rasputin blinked. His lids had hooded his
eyes without him realising. Scant seconds had passed since Reim had asked his
question.

But Rasputin had the answer.

Reim watching intently, said, “Who wins our
game of celestial cat and mouse?”

“The Angel.”

“My, my,” said Reim. “And so quick.” He
pressed further: “For bonus marks: Do you know the smallest value for
jump
at which our Angel survives?”

“Two,” said Rasputin, surprised to find it
sitting on the chessboard like a rock left by the tide. “But don’t ask me to
explain the proof. I have no idea why two jumps is enough.”

“Bravo!” said Reim, and clapped his hands.
“Nice to know you only need two steps to stay ahead of the Devil.”

Or two friends.

“Do you have a real question?” said
Rasputin.

Reim’s brow puckered in a frown. “Don’t be
coy. It took no less than three PhDs to solve that problem earlier this year.”

He leaned back, still surveying Rasputin
with fresh regard. “But you want harder? Try this: Picture in your mind a
circle of diameter one foot. Now square it for me. Make a square of that
circle. What length are its sides?”

“I said hard, not impossible,” said
Rasputin, without bothering to focus on the question. “Even I know the sides of
such a square would be a proportion of Pi, an irrational number; the digits
after the decimal point go on forever.”

“Forever, yes. As does anything that
matters.”

“You believe your wife still lives, don’t
you,” said Rasputin.

“Yes.”

“She was a good woman?”

“She is a forgiven woman.”

Rasputin couldn’t help but look away from
Reim. When he looked back he noticed a small brooch affixed to Reim’s lapel.
Engraved into its centre, just visible at a few feet, was the symbol for Pi.

“I thought you were a biologist.”

Reim caught his glance, and said, “When I
was young I considered a career in maths. I think that is where my boy Jop
caught the disease. But biology has a lot of maths, especially when one looks
at the molecular level.”

Reim tilted the brooch so he could peer at
it. “Pi is my favourite number, a prince among beggars. It is the key that
opens the portal for so many seemingly intractable problems.”

He unpinned the brooch and handed it to
Rasputin. Reim nodded: “Open it.”

Rasputin found a tiny catch at its side,
unlatched it. The brooch split. He prised it open on its hinge, and found
within a grainy photo that had lost its colour. A face looked out at him, a
woman’s face—lined and fleshy but beautiful.

Reim took his gaze from the river long
enough to touch the brooch with it. “Within the lesser love, is set the
greater.” The words sounded well worn on his tongue.

Rasputin closed it gently and handed it
back.

Minutes later they drew up to the jetty.
Reim scrambled onto it.

“Throw me that mooring line, Jop,” he said.

Rasputin quelled the urge to correct him
and passed him the rope. Rasputin noted how the old man’s hands, leathery to
the touch, were yet supple and swift as he tied off. He decided it was not any
sense of condescension that prevented him correcting Reim.

“It’s not broken,” said Jordy. “The
battery is missing.”

Rasputin couldn’t meet his eye. It was
obvious the phone’s cover had come loose by blunt-force trauma.

“It did feel lighter when I put it back
together. Hang on.”

Rasputin went to his room and searched
behind boxes he hadn’t unpacked in two years. He found the battery lying under
the flap of a box, sitting on lecture notes that were beginning to fade. He
retrieved it and returned to the kitchen, where twin fluorescent tubes cast the
brightest light in the house. Jordy took the battery, slotted it into place,
and snapped the cover back on. The phone bleeped.

“There. Happy phone,” he said, and handed
it back to Rasputin. “That’ll be $150.”

“You can have the equivalent in options on
my brain,” said Rasputin, and made for the front door.

“Where are you going?” Jordy called, not
following.

“For a walk.”
Or a whatever it is I do
now.

Rasputin made it as far as a park that
abutted the local primary school. The sun was unobscured, drawing the sap of
every tree, and the air smelled of clipped lawn. Summer was come.

Rasputin surveyed the park quickly. It was
empty. “What an indictment,” he said, but was pleased.

He switched his phone on, holding his
breath while it booted: Power, good. Signal strength. Network...

Messages.

You have 2 new message(s), it said.

He called up the first.

It said: For psycho readings call
1800-C-R-A-C-K-E-R-S.

More of the same. He eyed a nearby bin, a
yellow 40-gallon drum pinioned between two posts, and was tempted to toss the
phone into its dark mouth. Instead, he flicked the phone’s display to the
second message.

It said: Who r u?

He froze, then frowned, thinking he had
mistakenly called up the last message he had sent.

He hadn’t.

He began a new message and thumbed it in,
“U 1st or r u chkn.” He sent it and reclined on the bench with satisfaction,
only to be startled a minute later when it buzzed in his lap.

He snatched it up and retrieved the new
message: “I’m willing. Are you Abel?”

Rasputin muttered to himself, “Text or
write, but if you’re going to write, at least try to spell,” while he typed a
reply: “I’m all ears.”

A response arrived seconds later. “I’m your
looooong lost brother ;-)”

A rapid-fire exchange began.

“Bullshit. I don’t have a brother.”

“Like you don’t have a sister?”

That made him pause. It had begun to feel
like a game. He wondered if he was imagining his unknown interlocutor to be the
news reporter he had never met, trying something lateral. But it didn’t matter
who it was. Whoever it was knew something about Rasputin’s past that he himself
had only recently uncovered, something dark. And that scared him.

Another message arrived. “OK. Brothers,
close brothers, know each others’ thoughts, no?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Explore your memory for insults and
wounds.”

Something about the choice of the word
explore
made Rasputin uneasy. He began to knit together skeins of speculation into a
nascent theory.

He tested the theory’s strength: “Today’s?
Yesterday’s?”

“Don’t be coy. I mean ALL of them. Drop the
coin stamped with injustice’s image into the jukebox in your head and see what
plays.”

Fast as a bullet, shock bifurcated into
hope and fear. His theory held this much. Did he dare believe he had found
someone who understood the workings of his mind because they had witnessed the
same first-hand, from within?

He pushed harder. “Speak plainly. What
jukebox?”

“You know exactly what I mean: the Miracle
Machine in your Head that connects Memory and knits Knowledge, new from the
fragments of old.”

Rasputin collapsed back onto the bench. “My
God,” he said. “He knows.”

He texted back, “Wait,” and then did as
told. He reached for the remembered sensation of insult’s injury, of physical
blows and shame’s sting, distilled them, bound them into an organic bundle, and
dumped that bundle into his mind’s eye, a query.

The torrent of hurt that broke over him in
response struck like a physical blow, beat him down upon the bench. It pushed
him inward, into the eye, and held him there.

The eye’s wall was thronged with mockers,
an unrelieved gallery of antagonists. From the left he saw, a moment too late,
a 12-year-old’s fist close on him. (Why he had goaded a boy twice his weight he
couldn’t fathom.) The memory of the punch landed on his cheek, not crisp as the
real punch had been, but fluid like a jet of water, passing through his skin,
carrying the alien feel of violence within. The punch—brute instrument of pain—was
followed by a memory melange of half-seen smirks and half-heard quips at his
expense. Ghosts haunted the eye, girls he had liked, year-mates he had wanted
to be like. They slipped through him, seemingly oblivious to his presence,
leaving his skin prickling with embarrassment and burning shame at his
impotency.