Dark Matter (8 page)

But when he opened it, its covers flopped
apart to reveal a bare spine. It was empty. His elation died.

Was that all he remembered of it, the
cover? Nothing of its content?

He scanned the grotto again. Torchlight lit
all but its corners, where darkness gathered. He stooped to peer at the floor,
at what he had taken to be wisps of straw. He plucked a piece from the ground
and, holding it near the light, discovered it was not straw but a sliver of
paper. Along its length ran a fragment of text, a handful of words blotted in
places by ink:

“—repair ****** the errors of former years
and thus govern, ******* with the needs and glory of man, the awful unfolding
science of the future.”

A smile split his face. This was from the
preface, the very sentence he had told Jordy struck him, that the Allies having
endured blitz and battle had reached the brink of an abyss even more
terrifying: the nuclear age.

But where was the rest of it?

He turned to look at the creature. Its
limbs had stilled. Though it held the torch aloft, its posture was apologetic.
It looked to Rasputin how a bloodhound might look had it missed the fox but
caught the frog.

He held the strip of paper closer to the
flame to see if by its light he might discern the missing words. A muted glow
struggled through the yellow paper, but only made the blots darker by
comparison, gaps in the sentence his memory would not yield.

He became aware of Jordy in his peripheral
vision, out there in the real world. He seemed in stasis, standing by the
bookshelf from where he had sent Rasputin into the bowels of his memory.

With a stab of anger he thrust the paper
into the torch flame. It ignited and flared, coruscating like an arc welder.

A blaze ran down the creature’s arm,
consuming its fur, and engulfing it in a white bonfire. Rasputin smelled
burning hair, but the creature was silent. As the bonfire shrank and grew more
intense, he was forced to shield his eyes. Through slitted fingers he saw the
errand carrier collapse into a brilliant orb floating by his side.

For the first time, Rasputin wanted out of
his brain.

But now a greater transformation began. The
brilliance of the orb washed the walls. Its light smote the stone like furnace
fire. The stone began to sweat, and soon cataracts of molten lava poured
upwards and down, fleeing the horizon, dissolving imperfections, obliterating
edges.

No sooner had he realised the once-square
room had become a sphere, than the fluid slowed. It grew sluggish and congealed,
and as it cooled, its colour slid from red, to orange, yellow and white,
dimming as it went. The sphere was becoming translucent.

It was then Rasputin felt the first real
tremor of fear. Beyond those walls, something moved. His imagination was no
longer in command.

The surface became clear as glass, and
finally the errand-orb flung its light beyond the sphere. The light sprang into
an endless dark, and for Rasputin, it was as though he witnessed the birth of
the universe flaming into life.

But it was not an empty universe.

Out beyond the sphere, the sky was flocked
by objects beyond counting, which were tugged by unseen currents.

He tried to fix his eye on something,
anything, floating in the void, and was shocked to discover his own face.

It shimmered on an ovoid blob drifting just
beyond the sphere’s surface. The blob had a sheen like opal-lustre, and over
this film played images of him, seated and laughing, holding a black cane
topped by a pink bow. It was his last day in hospital, which meant...

The blob is a memory.

With wonder he cast his gaze further into
the deep and saw more remembered things afloat. Some contorted like wax in a
lava lamp, full-bodied sense bundles. Others drifted, mere shards of preserved
vision. Everywhere clots of the stuff tangled in a profusion of colour,
submarine detritus in ocean-refracted sunlight.

It dawned on him where this journey had
brought him.

In his quest for Churchill’s book, he had
first travelled the corridors of time, and then hunted in the maze of
serendipity, only to find its vestiges. But here all was laid bare. His mind’s
eye was a telescope trained on the heavens of his being, able to probe the
farthest galaxy. Travel was no longer necessary. He had only to bring the thing
desired into focus in its great lens.

At last he turned to the orb at his side.

“The book?” he said.

It pulsed.

Rasputin gritted his teeth and commanded:
“The Second World War. I read it last year. I want the preface. All of it.”

A thin, red arc crackled across the orb’s
surface. For an instant it seemed a vast, luminescent marble.

It smiled at me.

Then everything moved.

The great eye gyrated, sifting the skies
for one object. When seconds later it was trained upon a pinpoint glint, it
flung its focus out, and drew on that lone ray of light as upon a tether.

And so it came, a single memory, a bundle
of five-fold sense, compressed but complete. It came near, shy but curious, in
a first contact of sorts.

It was motionless a moment, and then its
surface peeled back like opening petals to reveal a book.

Without lifting a hand, he opened the cover
and leafed to the beginning of the preface. Words stood stark on the page. None
were obscured by ink. Even a small, brown speckle, a stain left by someone
during the book’s life in the library, was preserved in the memory.

He smiled and began to read.

The smile remained while he read every
word, reveling in the sense of power it brought him. It was the same feeling
that had intoxicated him, so briefly, when sketching alone the night after his
interview. But now he had bottled the lightning.

As he read, his consciousness drifted back
into the lounge of his flat. The words, he found, were on his lips. Jordy stood
at the bookshelf holding the real book in his hands, glancing at it now and
then without moving his head, a wicked grin affixed.

But just before the transition back into
the real world was complete and his sense of the dazzling errand carrier waned
altogether, he saw colour flicker across its surface. He felt its attention
turn from him, from his centre of consciousness, to the constellations of his
memory.

He had the strangest sense it was
curious
.

The thought terrified him. Fear tugged at
the last words to fall from his lips.

“...the awful unfolding science of the
future.”

Jordy was a statue for the time it took
Rasputin’s heart to squeeze a few hundred mils of blood through its chambers.

“Word,” he said suddenly, and snapped the cover
of the book closed. “For,” he said, and bent to slide it into the hole it had
left on the shelf. “Word,” he finished, and stood up straight.

Rasputin sighed.

“I know,” he conceded.

“Don’t tell me that’s normal,” said Jordy.

“No, not normal.” He remembered the
wall-come-to-life, and what had emerged from its dying fire. “Quite abnormal.”

“But you don’t look excited.”

He wanted to be, but his last glimpse of
the errand carrier, and the proprietary gaze it had cast over his memory, left
him feeling bone-cold.

“One last test,” said Jordy, and
disappeared into the kitchen.

Test?

Rasputin decided Jordy was being
suspiciously goal-directed.

Jordy returned holding a glossy magazine.
It was an edition of
Food Ideas
, in which every page featured the kind
of lushly prepared and lit delicacies that earned it the term food porn. Dee
had a subscription to the magazine, and left old copies on their fridge in the
hopes of lifting the culinary standard. Rasputin liked the photos, hated
cooking.

Jordy searched the magazine, stopped at a
page, and said, “Mongolian lamb.”

Rasputin took a moment to decide it wasn’t
an insult.

It was a good test. His eyes would have
barely scanned the recipe. He recalled it without looking within. “500 grams of
lamb,” he began, and rattled off the rest verbatim.

“It was either that or a tampon ad,” said
Jordy.

“Now I’m hungry. And why are you so
excited?”

Jordy sat and fished over his chair’s arm
for the TV remote. “Your memory might have improved, but you’re still thick.”

He strafed the free-to-air channels, and
evidently found what he was looking for. “Like it was meant to be,” he said,
and unmuted the sound.

Jordy had stopped at channel Nine. It was
broadcasting the same quiz show Rasputin had watched in the foodhall the night
of his accident, Temptation. Jordy’s behaviour finally made sense.
One-dimensional sense.

“Tempted?” he said.

Rasputin took a swallow of his now-warm
beer before answering. “This is the most animated I’ve seen you since I came
out of hospital. And the reason?” He jerked his head at the TV. “You’ve got
dollar-bill vision?”

Jordy didn’t have a comeback. That was odd.
He returned to the kitchen. When he reappeared, he was carrying an envelope.

Shit. Not another one.

 
“What’s that?” said Rasputin. “Thanks from
Eric Hewitt’s panel beater? Or did I win lotto?”

“The opposite,” said Jordy, and dropped the
envelope into his lap.

Printed on it was an icon of a
snake-entwined staff. It was from the medical clinic. It had been opened and
inside he found an invoice for his surgery. He skipped over the blurb and found
the dollar figure. It had three zeros, and more than one figure in front.

“Sorry,” said Jordy. “It came yesterday and
I thought I’d be able to pay it. I called the clinic to say there must be some
mistake, but the receptionist just crapped on about gap cover, and hung-up when
I mentioned the ombudsman. I know student assistance isn’t exactly the mother
lode. But that...” He shrugged.

Is game over for study.
Rasputin pictured himself telemarketing pet shampoos.

Jordy changed tack. “Your leg will mend.
When it does, you can pay it out of your night fill.”

How am I going to tell him?

Rasputin’s gaze weighed a ton. “I already
owe money. Night fill was barely paying the interest.”

“What money?”

“You and Dee were in Sydney.”

“What money, Monk?”

“The money I borrowed to buy”—his tongue
refused to form
Heroin
— “painkillers.”

“For your leg?” said Jordy.

“You’re not listening. This was over a
month ago, before the accident.”

“What then?”

“Does it matter?”

Jordy’s expression collapsed as
understanding dawned. In a voice unfamiliar, he said, “Is there any left?”

“A little. I was almost done with it,”
Rasputin said, and attempted to lighten the mood. “No great revelations were
forthcoming.”

“Where?”

“Under the bottom drawer of my desk, in the
cavity.” He almost added: the cache of guilty things.

Jordy strode into the hall. Rasputin heard
the rasping sound of a drawer being wrenched free. When he returned, he went
straight to the front door without sparing Rasputin a glance.

“Where are you going?”

“To get rid of this shit properly. Past the
S-bend isn’t far enough for some junkies.” He slammed the door, but not before
Rasputin heard him mutter, “Selfish bastard.”

Rasputin stared at the invoice. It had
stuck to his sweaty fingers. His gaze drifted to the crisp green icon on the
letter head, the snake-and-staff.

“I never did get the snake and staff,” he
said. “But of course. The snake bites you, and if you survive, they beat you to
death with the stick.”

He lowered the letter to look at the TV.
Temptation was still on. He remembered with a pang how animated Jordy had been
only minutes earlier.

A booth lit as a contestant buzzed in, and
said, “The locomotive engine.”

The host nodded, already prepping another
question card, and said, “Correct. George Stephenson invented the first steam
locomotive engine for rail.”

I
knew that.

The camera cut back to the contestants, and
behind them sat the jackpot. It stood at a quarter of a million dollars.

That had three zeros and some numbers
before it.

The next three days came and went as
if the conversation had not happened. The only inkling something was afoot was
Jordy’s unsinkable geniality. He was like that when fixing things, but the
current flock of warm fuzzies were on amphetamines.

Nor could Rasputin stop Temptation
percolating through his mind. In the light of day, without the leaven of beer,
the idea was preposterous. Who had even met someone who had been on the show?
They weren’t real people. The show was probably concocted in a computer using
the showbiz equivalent of EFACE.