“I think I realized that.”
“Well, take it to heart. Out there on land you’ll meet all kinds of different opinions. Some people will hear talk about the secret commonwealth and take it literally, and think you do too, and that you’re stupid. Others just scoff, as if they already know it’s a lot of moonshine. Both stupid. Keep away from the literal-minded folk, and ignore the scoffers.”
“What’s the best way of thinking about the secret commonwealth, then, Master Brabandt?”
“You gotta think about it the same way as if you want to see it. You got to look at it sideways. Out the corner of your eye. So you gotta think about it out the corner of your mind. It’s there and it en’t, both at the same time. If you want to see them jacky lanterns, the absolute worst way is to go out on the marsh with a searchlight. You take a bloody great light, and all the will o’ the wykeses and the little sparkers, they’d stay right underwater. And if you want to think about them, it don’t do no good making lists and classifying and analyzing. You’ll just get a lot o’ dead rubbish what means nothing. The way to think about the secret commonwealth is with stories. Only stories’ll do.”
He blew on his tea to cool it.
“So thassit,” he said. “And what you learning all these things for, anyway?”
“Did I tell you about Karamakan?”
“I never heard that name before. What’s that?”
“It’s a desert in Central Asia. The thing is…Well, dæmons can’t go into it.”
“Why would anyone want to go where their dæmon can’t?”
“To find out what’s inside. They grow roses there.”
“What, in the desert?”
“There must be somewhere hidden where the roses grow. Special roses.”
“Ah, well, they would be.” He sipped his tea with a loud slurp and pulled out a blackened old smoke pipe.
“Master B, is the secret commonwealth only in Brytain, or all over the world?”
“Oh, it’s all over the world, naturally. But I ’spect there’s other names for it in other places. Like in Holland, they got a different name for the jacky lanterns. They call ’em dwaallichts. And in France they call ’em feu follets.”
Lyra thought about it. “When I was young,” she said, “when I went to the north with the gyptian families, I remember Tony Costa telling me about the phantoms they had in the northern forests, the Breathless Ones, and the Windsuckers….I suppose they must be part of the secret commonwealth of the north.”
“Stands to reason.”
“And later in another place I saw Specters….They were different again. And that was even in a different world altogether. So maybe there’s a secret commonwealth everywhere.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” he said.
They sat there quietly for a minute or two, the gyptian packing his pipe with smokeleaf, Lyra helping herself to a sip of his tea.
“Where you going next, Master B?” she said.
“Up north. Nice peaceful work, hauling stone and bricks and cement for that railroad bridge as is going to put us all out of business.”
“What’ll you do then?”
“Come back here and catch eels. Time I settled down. I’m past me first youth, ye see.”
“Oh. I hadn’t realized.”
“No, I know it dun’t show.”
She laughed.
“What you laughing for?” he said.
“You take after your grandson.”
“Yes, I learnt a lot from young Dick. Or was it the other way round? I can’t remember. Did he treat you proper?”
“He treated me very proper.”
“Thass all right, then. Cheerio, Lyra. Good luck.”
They shook hands, and she looked in and said good night to Betty, and then she left.
Ma Costa was already asleep in the forward cabin of the Persian Queen, so Lyra moved carefully as she boarded the boat, treading lightly and making no noise as she prepared for bed.
And once she was tucked up warmly in her bunk, with the little naphtha lamp glowing on the bedside shelf, she found herself wide awake. She thought about writing to Malcolm again; she thought about writing to Hannah; and she thought about something that had never occurred to her before—why she so enjoyed the company of old men like Giorgio Brabandt and Farder Coram.
That caught her attention. She began to think it through. She liked them a lot, and she’d liked the old Master of Jordan, Dr. Carne, and she liked Mr. Cawson the Steward. And Sebastian Makepeace the alchemist. She liked them much more than most young men. It wasn’t because they were too old to be interested in her sexually, and didn’t make her feel threatened: Mr. Cawson was known to be a ladies’ man, and Giorgio Brabandt had been frank about his own girlfriends, though he’d said she didn’t have enough mileage on her to qualify as one herself.
It was something in that region of feelings. Then she had it: she liked being in their company not because they might be attracted to her, but because there was no danger of her being attracted to them. She didn’t want to be unfaithful to the memory of Will.
What about Dick Orchard, though? Why didn’t her brief romantic liaison with him count as being unfaithful? Probably because neither of them had once used the word love. He was frank about what he wanted, and he knew enough to make sure she enjoyed it as much as he did. And he liked her, and made that clear. And she liked the touch of his lips on her skin. There’d been nothing of the all-consuming, all-pervading intensity and ardent passion she and Will had felt together, each for the first time; she and Dick were simply two healthy young people under the spell of a golden summer, and that was quite enough to be.
That dream, though: the one in which she was playing with Will’s dæmon on the moonlit grass, stroking her, whispering together, in thrall to each other. The memory of it was still enough to make her body throb and melt and yearn for something impossible, unnameable, unreachable. Something like Will, or like the red building in the desert. Deliberately she let herself drift on a slow current of longing, but it didn’t last; she couldn’t bring it back; she lay awake with all the longing frustrated, the memory of that love dream fading, no nearer sleep than ever.
Finally, tired and exasperated, she took out her copy of Simon Talbot’s The Constant Deceiver.
The chapter she was reading began:
ON THE NON-EXISTENCE OF DÆMONS
Dæmons don’t exist.
We might think they do; we might talk to them and hold them close and whisper our secrets to them; we might make judgments about other people whose dæmons we think we see, based on the form they seem to have and the attractiveness or repulsiveness they embody; but they don’t exist.
In few other areas of life does the human race display so great a capacity for self-deception. From our earliest childhoods we are encouraged to pretend that there exists an entity outside our bodies which is nevertheless part of ourselves. These wispy playmates are the finest device our minds have yet developed to instantiate the insubstantial. Every social pressure confirms us in our belief in them: habits and customs grow like stalagmites to fix the soft fur, the big brown eyes, the merry tricks in a behavioral cavern of stone.
And all the multitudinous forms this delusion takes are nothing more than random mutations of cells in the brain….
Lyra found herself reading on, though she wanted to deny every word. Talbot had an explanation for everything. The fact that children’s dæmons appeared to change form, for example, was no more than a representation of the greater malleability of the infant and juvenile mind. That they were usually, but not always, opposite in sex to their person was merely an unconscious projection of the sense of incompleteness felt by the human subject: yearning for its opposite, the mind embodied the complementary gender role in a sexually non-threatening creature, which could fulfill the part without evoki
ng sexual desire or jealousy. The dæmon’s inability to move far from the person was simply a psychological expression of a sense of unity and wholeness. And so on.
Lyra yearned to tell Pan about this, and discuss the extraordinary sight of a clever mind attempting almost successfully to deny an obvious reality; but it was too late for that. She put the book down and tried to think like Talbot. His method consisted mainly of saying “X is [no more than, nothing but, only, merely, just, simply, etc.] Y”; and it was easy therefore to construct sentences such as “What we call reality is nothing but a gathering of flimsy similarities held together by habit.”
And that didn’t help at all, though no doubt Talbot’s explanation would have come with a multitude of examples and citations and arguments, each one perfectly reasonable and seemingly impossible to deny, by the end of which the reader would be a step nearer accepting his main argument, the preposterous idea that dæmons did not exist.
She felt unbalanced by his words, in a way that felt like reading the alethiometer with the new method. Things that had been steady were now unfixed; the very ground was shaky; she trembled on the edge of vertigo.
She put The Constant Deceiver down and thought about the other book that had made Pan angry, Gottfried Brande’s novel The Hyperchorasmians. For the first time she realized that the two writers had more in common than she’d thought. The famous sentence that ended The Hyperchorasmians—“It was nothing more than what it was”—was constructed exactly like a sentence of Talbot’s. Why hadn’t she seen that before? And then she remembered that Pan had tried to tell her.
She wanted to talk about it. She took a sheet of paper and started to write to Malcolm. But she must have been tired; her summary of Talbot’s arguments seemed both heavy-handed and thin, her description of The Hyperchorasmians confused and confusing; she couldn’t summon any confidence or ease, and her sentences lay inert on the page. She felt defeated even before she’d finished a single paragraph.
She thought, If there were such things as Specters, this is what it would feel like to be in a Specter’s power. The Specters she was thinking of were those dreadful parasites that fed on the inhabitants of Cittàgazze. Now that she was an adult, and Pan’s form was fixed, she would be as vulnerable to the Specters as the adults of that world had been. Simon Talbot could never have been to Cittàgazze, so Specters made no appearance in The Constant Deceiver. No doubt he’d have a fluent and persuasive argument for denying their existence as well.
She put her pen away and tore up the page. The question was, she thought, was the universe alive or dead?
From somewhere far off on the marshes came the cry of an owl.
Lyra found herself thinking, What does that mean? and simultaneously thought of Talbot’s inevitable reply: “It doesn’t mean anything.” Some years before, in Oxford, she’d had an encounter with the dæmon of a witch, in a little adventure that had culminated in her thinking that everything meant something, if only she could read it. The universe had seemed alive then. There were messages to be read everywhere you looked. Something like the cry of an owl out on the marshes would have been blazing with significance.
Had she just been wrong then to feel that? Or immature, naive, sentimental? Simon Talbot would have said both, but charmingly, delicately, wittily. Devastatingly.
She had no answer. A tiny spark of consciousness in the oceanic night, and with her dæmon merely a projection of her unconscious mind, having no real existence at all, wherever he might be now, Lyra felt as unhappy and alone as she had ever done in her life.
* * *
* * *
“But where is she?”
Marcel Delamare asked the question with enormous and unconcealed patience. The lamplight, glaring from over his shoulder full in the face of Olivier Bonneville, disclosed a hint of clamminess, of pallor, of physical unease in the young man. Delamare was glad to see it: he meant to make Bonneville even more uneasy before the interview was over.
“I can’t pinpoint her,” Bonneville snapped. “The alethiometer doesn’t work like that. I know she’s traveling, and I know she’s going east. More than that, no one could tell.”
“Why not?” Very patiently indeed.
“Because the old method, which is the one you want me to use, Monsieur Delamare, is static. It’s based on a set of relationships which may be very complex but are fixed.” He stopped and stood up.
“Where are you going?” said Delamare.
“I’m damned if I’m going to be interrogated with that light in my eyes. I’ll sit over here.” He slouched to the sofa next to the fireplace. “If you’d let me use the new method, I could find her in no time,” he went on, putting his feet up on the tapestry-covered stool. “That’s dynamic. It allows for movement. It makes all the difference.”
“Take your feet off that stool. Turn to face me so I can see whether you’re lying.”
In response, Bonneville lay back along the sofa, his head on one arm, his feet on the other. He stared at Delamare briefly, and then put his head back and gazed at the ceiling, nibbling at a fingernail.
“You don’t look well,” said the Secretary General. “You look as if you’ve got a hangover. Have you been drinking to excess?”
“Kind of you to ask,” said Bonneville.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
Delamare took a deep breath and sighed. “The point is this,” he said. “You are doing very little work. The last report you filed was nearly empty of useful content. Our arrangement will come to an end this Friday, unless by then you’ve made a real and relevant discovery.”
“What d’you mean, our arrangement? What arrangement?”
“The arrangement by which you are using the alethiometer. The privilege can easily be—”
“You want to take it away? A lot of good that’ll do you. There’s no one half as quick as me, even with the old method. If you—”
“It’s no longer simply a question of speed. I don’t trust you, Bonneville. For a while you seemed to promise an advantage. Now, because of your self-indulgent posturing, that advantage has disappeared. The Belacqua girl has eluded us, and you seem to have no—”
“All right, then,” Bonneville said, and stood up. He looked paler than ever. “Have it your own way. Take the alethiometer. Send someone round in the morning to collect it. You’ll regret it. You’ll say sorry, you’ll beg and plead, but I won’t lift a finger. I’ve had enough.”
He picked up a cushion from the sofa and seemed about to throw it, probably into the fire; but he just dropped it on the floor and sauntered out.
Delamare tapped his fingers on the desk. It hadn’t gone the way he’d planned, and he blamed himself. Once again Bonneville had outwitted, or to be more accurate, out-insolenced him. Unfortunately, the boy was quite right: none of the other alethiometrists was a patch on him for speed or accuracy, and none had mastered the new method. Even though Delamare mistrusted it, he had to admit that the new method had produced some startling results. He suspected that Bonneville was using it despite his prohibition.
Perhaps, the Secretary General thought, it had been a mistake to rely so closely on the alethiometer. The older methods of spying still worked, as they had done for centuries, and the Magisterium’s intelligence network was powerful and had a long reach, with agents throughout Europe and across Asia Minor, as well as further east. Perhaps it was time to awaken them. Events were soon going to move fast in the Levant; it would be a wise precaution to put every agent on the alert.
He called in his secretary and dictated several notes. Then he put on his overcoat and hat and went out.
* * *
* * *
Marcel Delamare’s private life was intensely discreet. It was known that he was not married and assumed that he was not homosexual, but that was all. He had few friends and no hobbies, didn’t collect ceramics or
play bridge or attend the opera. A man of his age and state of health might normally be expected to have a mistress, or to visit a brothel occasionally, but no whispers of that sort ever attended his name. The fact was that journalists didn’t find him a very promising subject. He was a dull functionary working in an obscure department of the Magisterium, and that was all. The papers had long given up hope of gaining readers by writing about Monsieur Delamare.
So no one followed when he went out for an evening walk, or saw him ring the bell of a large house in a quiet suburb, or watched as he was admitted by a woman in the habit of a nun. The light that came on over the door just before she opened it was exceptionally dim.
The nun said, “Good evening, Monsieur Delamare. Madame is expecting you.”
“How is she?”
“Adjusting to the new medication, we hope, monsieur. The pain is a little better.”
“Good,” said Delamare, handing her his coat and hat. “I’ll go straight up.”
He climbed the carpeted staircase and knocked at a door in a softly lit passageway. A voice from inside told him to enter.
“Maman,” he said, and bent over the old woman in the bed.
She turned her cheek to receive the kiss. Her wrinkled lizard dæmon drew back on the pillow, as if there were the slightest danger that Delamare might kiss him too. The room was close and hot, and smelled oppressively of lily of the valley, pungently of embrocation, and faintly of physical decay. Madame Delamare was extremely thin, for reasons of fashion, and had once been handsome. Her sparse yellow hair was stiffly coiffed and she was immaculately made up, though a tiny amount of the scarlet lipstick had seeped into the tight lines that led away from her mouth, and no amount of cosmetics could conceal the savagery in her eyes.
Delamare sat on the chair next to the bed.
“Well?” his mother said.
The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) Page 28