Dark Matter (40 page)

The card was a stub for an account of a
patient with prodigious mental capacity. Pasted to the back of the card was a
photostat of the abstract from the original letter to the publishing journal.
The patient was remarkable for the ability to remember forty-two numbers in
sequence after hearing the sequence only once. That gift was courtesy of a
brain lesion.

I was impressed.

But what did this have to do with the
Elephant Man, and von Recklinghausen’s Disease? I began to wonder about the
identity of Mr. G., and his motives.

For the remainder of that day I followed
his trail through this library of libraries, as it brachiated, reaching across
wide swathes of Knowledge’s domain, and circled back upon itself infuriatingly:
from salient cases reported by Harley Street’s chirurgeons to accounts of witch
doctoring in African tribes in the annals of anthropology; the herbology of the
opium poppy and synthesis of the new psychedelics; X-ray crystallography of the
two dimensional structure of DNA; and the lifecycle of the Asian salamander. At
times I thought I could see Mr. G.’s mind working, and even divine beforehand
where next his search would lead. Many times he slotted into the ruts of trails
blazed by other researchers, passing along their routes, a shadow come days or
years after—as I was now treading in his tracks.

Eventually daylight failed. My eyes were
sore, my fingers dusty, with deciphering cards. I left, but not to the drinking
hall. I went to my barracks, to my pallet, and pondered.

I didn’t know it then, but I was suffering
the first ague of an addiction, an addiction to knowledge.

I dreamt that night of an image I saw that
day. It was a lithograph, printed on an invitation to a conference announced by
Otlet. I found it amid paper covering the floor like leaf litter, a storm
trooper’s boot print tattooed over it. The image depicted a stylised ship,
sailing toward the setting sun on a dark, wind-tossed sea. Emblazed on its
billowing sail were entwined ellipses, the symbol of the globe. Books were its
only cargo. It seemed to say: here is the Ark, and its precious cargo is not
man but text.

On rising the next morning I decided the
library must be mine. Vested with the power of the
KunstSchutz
, it was a
simple matter to declare the library worthless, and have it packed—all
materials, journals, photographs, maps, and the invaluable index to it all—for
freighting to one of the many bonfires burning in Brussels; vested with the
power of the Schürmans, it was simpler still to redirect that freight to our
schloss in the Alps.

A small part of it escaped my notice. Still
today it is housed in a museum dedicated to it, and moulders there, a relic, a
curio, with barely the patronage required to keep the lights burning.

Before I left Brussels I met Otlet, a
little bespectacled man of grief-dimmed eye. I thought him a genius and told
him so.

From the Alps I summoned my brother. I
trusted him in the martial field, and he trusted me in the cognitive. I sold
him the idea of a grand game, a complex riddle. It would require him to scour
Europe, behind and beyond the Front, for books, items, who knew what. As boys
we had played at secret missions, and hunts for lost treasure. Here was the
mission par excellence.

The first item I had him fetch were the
only samples of tissue preserved from Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man.
Following autopsy they had been taken by his friend and doctor, Treves. I
wanted them. I didn’t know why. Perhaps retrieving them was a test of strength
for Hans (they lay in London). Perhaps they were my symbol, my icon, a banner
beneath which I would pursue the quest to discover what great secret was
evidenced by the search of Mr. G. For there was a secret, I was sure of it.

Three weeks later, I was screening staff
for the lab that was to be the core of the apparatus of my quest, when a
package arrived. I assumed it was from Hans. I had dispatched him to the
university museum at Koln in search of an idol, a small stone totem with
peculiar grooves in its head. But upon opening the package I found instead a
machine that looked much like a typewriter. The following day a telephone call
was made to the schloss. The caller claimed to be from Intelligence, and I thought
at first I had run afoul of the Gestapo. I soon learned the man believed
himself to be part of a sanctioned intelligence operation. He was mistaken.

He asked me: “Herr Schürmann, have you
received the machine?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Good. I will dictate a message to you, and
you are to enter it verbatim into the machine.”

I wondered what he was playing at, but
retrieved the machine.

I sat alone in my library, the only sound
the muted roar of sleet and the crackle of fire. I informed him I was ready.

He began to speak words that made complete
gibberish: fish, gristle, tidal, puncture...

I typed each word into the machine, slowly,
hunting the keyboard for each letter, pecking with my index fingers. Every time
I entered a space to delineate a word, the machine hummed and spat out a word
of its own, a different word, onto the paper I had slotted into it.

The first statement to emerge was: burn
immediately following consumption.

Ah! I thought, a simple word-cipher. But
no, for I found that a cipher word did not produce the same clear-text with
repeated use. Decryption seemed to depend on the context of the word, what came
before.

In this way, a message formed with glacial
speed.

You might have guessed the man on the
telephone was a cut-out. Without the coding machine, he could not know what
message he was transmitting, and I never heard the voice of the message giver.

I told you Clotho was paranoid.

You see it was Clotho’s peregrinations
through the tracts of Otlet’s informationscape that I was shadowing. Why “Mr.
G.?”—perhaps for
Gamma
, the third letter of the Greek alphabet. I don’t
know. When transmission of the message was complete and the caller hung up
without further ado, the sign-off was Clotho. It sounded like what it is:
another cipher.

I sat back to read the message in its
entirety, which I had been unable to do while rushing to keep up with the
spoken cipher.

It was in three parts: an introduction, an
explanation, and an offer.

Clotho introduced himself as one who was
aware of my researches, and a friend. His offer was to sponsor my induction to
an order called the Imago.

By far the largest part of the message was
the explanation. This I read many times over. It claimed to be the reality I
was groping toward in the fog of Clotho’s stale tracks. Its assertions baffled
me, and stung me with a fierce zeal to confirm them.

The explanation began in the popular idiom
of Nazi Germany. Its first line read: You don’t know it, but you are looking
for the key that unlocks the master race.

He had my attention there.

It ran on: Better to say not
race
but
phase
.

It claimed that every human has dormant
within them prodigies. If we would only open the sluices to release the
biochemical cascades that inundate this fertile plain, we should be gods on
earth.

SBTQVUJO

“Caesar.”

“Pardon, sir?”

“I’ll have the Caesar salad please,
mijn
jonge
.” Professor Reim Tieke De Groot stretched, and settled his belt more
comfortably beneath his paunch. “The heat of summer here always catches me. So:
the salad.”

“Yes, sir,” said the waiter, smiling
despite having failed to comprehend the connection, and bustled out of sight.

Reim reflected on the fact his father would
never have paid good money for a salad. His father had not been fond of parting
with money, period.

A dignified murmur of conversation soothed
his ears. He sipped from wine he had ordered before the meal—something his
father
would
have done—and let his gaze fall on the window his table
abutted. Reflected in it was the restaurant’s low, warm mood lighting. He
relaxed his focus and let his gaze find the channel lights pulsing red and
green over the river. He relaxed it further, to the dark mass of King’s Park,
the moon hanging above it, then beyond the world, as he ceased to see and tried
again to corral his scattered thoughts.

They centred on Rasputin. In more ways than
one, he was an enigma.

Reim’s history was littered with attempts
to play father to those who were without. For some few he had, he felt,
successfully given a little of himself. He had a history, too, of wrestling
with stubborn problems of biology, and there had met with much success. But
now, in the twilight of his life, he found both powers called upon for the sake
of the same object: Rasputin—in the twilight, when powers fade.

He scratched a tuft of hair his razor had
missed.

Rasputin the problem
: greater than the sum of its parts.

Deanne had called on him. She had confessed
to sending Rasputin, and alluded to a buried grief she believed was eating away
at him. Reim had probed him about it gently, and knew, from his terse answers
and abrupt re-directions, the contours of that grief, if not the content.

That was one part. The other was his
physiology. His blood work was unique. He should be dead, or at the very least
in the process of being eaten alive by his own immune system. Admittedly, the
lab tests weren’t infallible. They were susceptible to corruption. They could
be skewed by incorrect blood collection. The same chain-reaction mechanism used
to amplify a genetic line into testable quantities could amplify, instead of
the target DNA, some contaminant. Mice, cockroaches, even plant life, could
muddy the waters beyond recovery. But for each of these threats, there were
protocols that caused suspicious results to throw flags. None had risen.

So he should be dead. That he wasn’t,
troubled Reim’s professional equanimity at a profound level.

And yet... Something niggled him. Some
things
.
If he viewed his understanding of human biology as a pattern within the larger
pattern of the knowledge he had synthesised of the larger animal kingdom—a
pattern woven, unpicked, and re-woven over many years of theory applied in
experiment—he felt there was a repetition, a connection, he was failing to see.
Some feature of the precise detail of Rasputin’s singular blood waited, in the
penumbra of his perception, like a spider web hung behind wire mesh, to be
resolved by a change of focus. If only he could effect that shift. It hovered
just beyond conscious thought, like the shape of a word without the sound.

With a sigh, he lifted his glass. He
swirled the remaining wine, preparing to drink it. The burgundy liquid eddied,
momentarily revealing an ellipse of glass beneath.

Reim froze. Wine pooled again at the bottom
of the glass.

Again he swirled the liquid, watched it
ride up, pressed by centrifugal force, to reveal that lens of glass beneath its
centre, and then, when his hand became still, revert to its original form.

“Your Caesar, sir.” The waiter eased a bowl
filled with a mountain of lettuce and smelling of garlic before Reim.

“
Idioot!
” Reim whispered hoarsely.

He thumped the glass down, slopping wine
onto the table, rose, and left, leaving the waiter to watch a red stain spread
across the tablecloth, wondering what he had done.

The call tone cut out as the
connection went through.

“Rasputin? I’ve been an idiot! I know what
is happening to you. I scarcely believe it, but you are entering—”

“Professor De Groot?” Dee cut over him.

“Yes,” he said, as though having to check.
“Who is this?”

“Dee Morgan, and you were going to say
Hibernation
,
weren’t you.”

“Yes,” he said, even more baffled. “How did
you know?”

“It’s happening. We found him last night
outside, lying in the grass. He’d passed out. We put him to bed, but this
morning...”

“This morning?” Reim pressed his ear closer
to the receiver, as if he could come nearer to Dee.

“Professor,” said a man’s voice, Jordy’s.
The static on the line increased as he pressed the phone’s speaker button. “His
skin. It’s toughened, cracked. His mouth is sealed with it.” His voice sounded
on the verge of hysteria to himself, though he felt an odd calmness.

“Jordan—it is Jordan isn’t it?” said Reim.
“Rasputin is not just hibernating. He is entering a chrysalis.”

“A chrysalis,” Jordy repeated, as if
checking off items on a shopping list.

“He is entering a process of change. He is
metamorphosing.”

Jordy’s calm broke. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It is. And it’s true. I checked his tests
again last night and saw what has been staring me in the face. No, I have never
seen
exactly
this before, not in humans. But the paradigm, yes. In
insects, amphibians, even fish. The systemic changes. The cascading expression
of genes that control for the enzymes needed to”—he swallowed—“consume the
animal’s body, take it down to the skeleton, back to the blueprint, before
rebuilding it.”