Dark Matter (38 page)

“Why didn’t I notice the GPS indicator?”

“The same malicious code removes it unless
you’re using a program that uses the GPS, like, say, the navigator.”

Rasputin sat back as his thoughts knit
together. This was how the guy had known he was in the park, on the bus. He had
been tracking him the entire time. It comforted him that he had not been
surveilled in person, but the comfort was fleeting. The train of his thought
crashed on.

“Why would someone give me a phone to track
me?”

“There’s worse,” said Jordy.

The thought occurred to Rasputin:
What
about the other zeros?

Jordy evidently saw the realisation dawn on
his face. “That’s right.”

He began calling up more windows.

“I’ve put your phone on earth, but it’s
still lacking realism. For that, I need”—he clicked a button—“sound.”

From the computer’s speakers sprang the
ever so familiar sound of John Cleese arguing with a pet store owner.

“Now, pipe that into the phone...”

And voila!
thought Rasputin. He saw the packet sniffer’s river of zeros flee, followed by
a mess of characters, an oil slick chasing clear water.

Jordy sighed. “Your phone is splicing in
whatever it hears, and transmitting it who knows where.”

Without verbal assent, they rose and trod
the hall back to the kitchen. The phone lay on the bench, its charge light a
happy amber, as it sat supping contentedly on the current flowing from the wall
socket.

Jordy lifted it from the bench and switched
it off.

“I found the beast,” said Jordy. He held
the phone up for Rasputin to see.

“A bug,” said Rasputin.

Jordy agreed to keep trying to crack
open the phone’s parasitic code, to see if he could discover where it was
sending transmissions. All he would venture was that the modification to the
phone involved hardware. How else was it tunnelling data over standard mobile
protocols? He didn’t need to add that it implied considerable technical skill.

Rasputin couldn’t help wondering if the
instigator was Thorpe after all. Rasputin had been his prize pet.

Then there was Sam. He had the technical
resources to do it.

Both men had reason to surveil him. One to
confirm his investment, the other to purchase his desired career.

But he dismissed both in quick succession.
Thorpe had not been faking it in the dying moment’s of their last encounter.
His defences had been down, and, when proffered the phone, he had registered a
complete blank. As for Sam, Rasputin counted him a friend—that, or the world’s
best liar.

Reluctantly his thoughts released their
hold on these suspects, and drifted into the void of unknowns. Even his brain
refused to make headway on this mystery. It simply spun without traction in
darkness, binding it like a web around him. It weighed on his mood, and dulled
his senses.

It unleashed a torpor that enervated his
every limb and organ.

As summer’s onslaught began in earnest, he
took to dwelling in the relatively cool darkness of his room. He told Jordy he
was catching up on course material he had missed since the accident.

Christmas approached, but he spared it
scant thought. It was a celebration, a ritual to be done in the world out
there.

Sometime during a string of sweltering
days, when rats began scuffling in the roof cavity above his bed, shedding
nightmare into his sleep, and the heat was seeping in unrelenting waves through
the double-brick, he forsook the waking world altogether, save to eat, toilet,
and to keep up appearances for the watchful Jordy.

He learned the trick of catching his mind
in the act of waking, and shunting it, instead, into the eye, whereupon he
would play for hours among his memories, or in built worlds of fantasy.
Sometimes he would meld the two into a hybrid and rewrite the script of his
life.

He kept well away from the memory of his
sister. It had become a neutron star, sucking his will toward it in an
irresistible embrace if he strayed too near. The only escape then was to wake.
And then his body’s claims would fall upon him, and leach away all desire.

Jordy was too polite to break in upon him—something
Rasputin counted on. Dee was another matter. She entered his room mid-afternoon
on a Friday.

Rasputin was within, walking an urban
canyon built of a mixture of fancy and found-object, whose sides rose high
enough to block the rays of two westering suns. The canyon walls were made of
the same substance as the object he had found in the first pocket void. The
street he trod was not hard stone or asphalt but faintly elastic and moist. It
was thronged by all manner of creatures, none of them known to the annals of
zoology. Many-headed hydra plodded, necks craned, heads lofted, incessant and
aloof. Smaller creatures scurried in the shadows they cast. Beetle-like beings
canted from side to side in head-high domes of iridescent tortoise-armour, and
bristling with antennules and flagella that curled, split and coiled tighter
still.

Other beings swept the thoroughfare about
his feet, creatures that only became manifest when viewed askance, and vanished
if watched. They whorled, with the appearance of condensed clouds of
colour-tinged air, and bent the dying sunlight like floating lenses, warping
the image of organic surface beneath. They appeared to be atmospheric
disturbances, but for their own peculiar susurrus they contributed to the
ambient conversation on the street.

He had conjured this place the previous
day, and populated it with creatures stumbled upon in the festering places of
his mind. It was his zoo; he was warden. But today unfamiliar creatures moved
in it.

Something thumped against his leg like a
dog’s tail, and passed him in a tumbleweed spin. It was born along on many
stalks sprouting from its central mass, a nucleus in the form of a perfect
cube. Before he could study the creature, a shadow eclipsed them both as a
twisting, serpent-like shape masked both suns. It was the size of a bus,
rippling in the sky. Its hide appeared to be covered by interlocking metal
plates, but as undulations rode the length of its body in ponderous waves, the
plates warped and flowed, and wrinkled like skin.

He halted, unable to shrug a suspicion that
had been growing for days. Had there been a shift in the atmosphere? Was there
a taste in the air?

The place felt...
heavy
.

Dee’s presence seeped into this inner
world. She was the moon that chased the withering suns from the sky. Rasputin
surfaced.

She was seated in a lazy chair salvaged
from a roadside. He had no idea how long she had sat there.

“Why have you locked yourself away?” she
said.

He shrugged, not game to trust his freshly
conscious mind to form intelligible speech.

“Is this your monastery, Monk?”

He laughed. His room was the opposite of a
monk’s spartan cell. It was a magpie’s nest, piled with collected things.

“Give it a rest. This is an indulgence.”

Dee surveyed the room again, the drawn
curtains, the bed clothes twisted around his prone form.

“It feels more like penitence,” she said.

He propped himself up on his elbows. His
head hurt.

“What do you want? I want to sleep.”

“We’re going to the farm for the weekend. I
want you to come.”

“No thanks,” he said, and slumped back onto
his pillow. The brief separation of his skin from its material was enough for
him to feel his sweat on it.

“Please?” she said. “It isn’t far. If you
don’t like it, we’ll drop you back. The air is fresh. It’s quiet. We’ll build a
fire in the stove.”

He let his eyelids fold over his eyes, and
heard the creature-murmur of the strange street swell.

“Monk, what are you doing here?”

He whispered, wanting her to leave. “Study.
Rallying my strength. I just need some rest.”

She whispered then, but her words came
lancing through nevertheless. “This is no staging camp. You’re giving up.”

He heard a faint rustle. She had risen. He
heard the door open, a moment of silence, then, “We’re packing the car. We’ll
wait for you till four.”

She eased the door shut and was gone.

Susurrus rose in his ears. He began to bend
his made-world around him, on a whim thrusting a third sun into the sky. But
the will necessary to sustain the simulacrum wavered, and fell. He had been
infected with fear.

He woke fully. The source of the fear
crystallised.

Dee had intervened, as usual. But she had
not pried him out, had not man-handled him with her iron-tough concern. She had
spoken, yes. But not with sureness. Her voice had carried despair.

Minutes later he emerged into the dining
room. It had been agonising, to stand, to move.

Surprise registered on Jordy’s face.

Rasputin dumped the bag he had hastily
packed on the floor, unable to hold its meagre weight any longer.

“Fine. Show me this farm. But if I get
bitten by something, I’m biting back.”

An hour later Dee’s hatchback was
struggling up the scarp that overlooked Perth. Its young engine whined as it
bore them up the last winds of the road, unaccustomed to carrying three adult
bodies and sundries. Dee opened the throttle to overtake a road train whose
spent inertia had left it crawling. They crested the final rise, and the car,
let loose from gravity’s pull, stepped up through its gears. The embankments
hemming the road folded behind them and occluded the Swan Valley and its city.

Rasputin felt enclosed by forest. Spreading
out before him, over the hills that terminated at the scarp behind, were
rolling waves of green—a vast blanket turned back at the sea.

He checked his phone was off,
surreptitiously. Dee didn’t know of its sinister character, and Jordy had
agreed, reluctantly, not to tell her. He couldn’t bring himself to part with
it, not his only link with...what? Never mind. He would make it his talisman.

He slumped low in the back seat, and wound
the window lever a notch to ward off car sickness. Wind blustered around the
gap and drowned the conversation in the front. Their destination was an hour
out along the Great Eastern Highway, a couple of hundred hectares of land
tilled by Jordy’s family for generations. Jordy was the weak link, a country
boy with an affinity for computers, and averse to getting soil beneath his
nails. The land was now leased to a local farmer who, depending on the market,
ran sheep or cropped canola.

Rasputin steeped in the gentle roll of the
car and hum of its engine. He watched the thickets of trees come, separate and
pass.

But what began as a soothing, liquid
sensation soon became a drowning flood. Every passing leaf, every twig, every
stone, stalled mid-motion. All deviated from their neat, orderly lines of
parallax, and rushed at him, as though he were the singular focus of a perfect
perspective. Every physical object shed its material guise, and became a naked
datum of information. They became a blizzard, each flake stinging not his eye
but his mind, falling like a hand upon his shoulder—an interruption, a request,
a message, a warning. The car dragged him through a landscape that may as well
have been the collected output of the world’s news presses, shredded, dumped in
a paper downpour, and left for his mind to tease back together.

He experienced a burst of empathy for the
madman doomed to decipher messages in Morse tapped out by wind and branch on
the asylum window.

He quailed, and slid as low as the seat
would allow, and crooked an elbow over his ear. He closed his eyes to shut out
the torrent.

He was awoken by the noise of the tires
thrumming over the grill of a sheep-brake. He peeled his sweat-stuck cheek from
the door’s upholstery to raise his head and look out the windscreen. The sun’s
orb had fallen below nearby hills. The sky above their black backs was on fire
with its passing. Evidently Dee and Jordy had stopped on the way without waking
him.

Nestled beyond a shallow valley was a
house. The car slowed as Dee navigated a dirt road that led to the house. It
had not rained for weeks. Dust was a brown vapour boiling off the wheels. They
crossed a bridge of crushed rock over a shallow, seasonal creek, whose bed was
still inscribed with last winter’s flow. Rivergum branches hung low over the
track and scraped the car’s roof as they passed. Finally, Dee turned the car in
at the back of the house and halted. They were greeted by the forlorn gaze of
an old tractor’s headlights. It was stowed in a shed that might have served for
a car port in years past, and seemed doomed to stare at fields that no longer
needed it while it rusted back to its elements.

Dee killed the engine and Rasputin felt
engulfed by a vast silence. Slowly, his ears found the level, and he discerned
sound: the slow drip of water falling ten feet from a tank stand beside the
car, the whisper of leaves from an aged almond tree standing in the yard, and,
far off, frog and cicada calls.