Finally she brushed the hair out of her eyes and put the electrodes on her head, and then flexed her fingers and began to type. She felt intensely self-conscious.
Hello. I’m not sure what I’m
doing. Maybe this is crazy.
The words arranged themselves on the left of the screen, which was the first surprise. She wasn’t using a word-processing program of any kind—in fact, she was bypassing much of the operating system—and whatever formatting was imposing itself on the words, it wasn’t hers. She felt the hairs begin to stir on the back of her neck, and she became aware of the whole building around her: the corridors dark, the machines idling, various experiments running automatically, computers monitoring tests and recording the results, the air-conditioning sampling and adjusting the humidity and the temperature, all the ducts and pipework and cabling that were the arteries and the nerves of the building awake and alert … almost conscious, in fact.
She tried again.
I’m trying to do with words
what I’ve done before with a
state of mind, but
Before she had even finished the sentence, the cursor raced across to the right of the screen and printed:
ASK A QUESTION.
It was almost instantaneous.
She felt as if she had stepped on a space that wasn’t there. Her whole being lurched with shock. It took several moments for her to calm down enough to try again. When she did, the answers lashed themselves across the right of the screen almost before she had finished.
Are you Shadows? YES.
Are you the same as Lyra’s Dust? YES.
And is that dark matter? YES.
Dark matter is conscious? EVIDENTLY.
What I said to Oliver this morning, my idea about human evolution, is it CORRECT. BUT YOU NEED TO ASK MORE QUESTIONS.
She stopped, took a deep breath, pushed her chair back, flexed her fingers. She could feel her heart racing. Every single thing about what was happening was impossible. All her education, all her habits of mind, all her sense of herself as a scientist were shrieking at her silently: This is wrong! It isn’t happening! You’re dreaming! And yet there they were on the screen: her questions, and answers from some other mind.
She gathered herself and typed again, and again the answers zipped into being with no discernible pause.
The mind that is answering these questions isn’t human, is it? NO. BUT HUMANS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN US.
Us? There’s more than one of you? UNCOUNTABLE BILLIONS.
But what are you? ANGELS.
Mary Malone’s head rang. She’d been brought up as a Catholic. More than that—as Lyra had discovered, she had once been a nun. None of her faith was left to her now, but she knew about angels. St. Augustine had said, “Angel is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is spirit; if you seek the name of their office, it is angel; from what they are, spirit, from what they do, angel.”
Dizzy, trembling, she typed again:
Angels are creatures of Shadow matter? Of Dust? STRUCTURES. COMPLEXIFICATIONS. YES.
And Shadow matter is what we have called spirit? FROM WHAT WE ARE, SPIRIT; FROM WHAT WE DO, MATTER. MATTER AND SPIRIT ARE ONE.
She shivered. They’d been listening to her thoughts.
And did you intervene in human evolution? YES.
Why? VENGEANCE.
Vengeance for—oh! Rebel angels! After the war in Heaven—Satan and the Garden of Eden—but it isn’t true, is it? Is that what you FIND THE GIRL AND THE BOY. WASTE NO MORE TIME.
But why? YOU MUST PLAY THE SERPENT.
She took her hands from the keyboard and rubbed her eyes. The words were still there when she looked again.
Where GO TO A ROAD CALLED SUNDERLAND AVENUE AND FIND A TENT. DECEIVE THE GUARDIAN AND GO THROUGH. TAKE PROVISIONS FOR A LONG JOURNEY. YOU WILL BE PROTECTED. THE SPECTERS WILL NOT TOUCH YOU.
But I BEFORE YOU GO, DESTROY THIS EQUIPMENT.
I don’t understand. Why me? And what’s this journey? And YOU HAVE BEEN PREPARING FOR THIS AS LONG AS YOU HAVE LIVED. YOUR WORK HERE IS FINISHED. THE LAST THING YOU MUST DO IN THIS WORLD IS PREVENT THE ENEMIES FROM TAKING CONTROL OF IT. DESTROY THE EQUIPMENT. DO IT NOW AND GO AT ONCE.
Mary Malone pushed back the chair and stood up, trembling. She pressed her fingers to her temples and discovered the electrodes still attached to her skin. She took them off absently. She might have doubted what she had done, and what she could still see on the screen, but she had passed in the last half-hour or so beyond doubt and belief altogether. Something had happened, and she was galvanized.
She switched off the detector and the amplifier. Then she bypassed all the safety codes and formatted the computer’s hard disk, wiping it clean; and then she removed the interface between the detector and the amplifier, which was on a specially adapted card, and put the card on the bench and smashed it with the heel of her shoe, there being nothing else heavy at hand. Next she disconnected the wiring between the electromagnetic shield and the detector, and found the wiring plan in a drawer of the filing cabinet and set light to it. Was there anything else she could do? She couldn’t do much about Oliver Payne’s knowledge of the program, but the special hardware was effectively demolished.
She crammed some papers from a drawer into her briefcase, and finally took down the poster with the I Ching hexagrams and folded it away in her pocket. Then she switched off the light and left.
The security guard was standing at the foot of the stairs, speaking into his telephone. He put it away as she came down, and escorted her silently to the side entrance, watching through the glass door as she drove away.
An hour and a half later she parked her car in a road near Sunderland Avenue. She had had to find it on a map of Oxford; she didn’t know this part of town. Up till this moment she had been moving on pent-up excitement, but as she got out of her car in the dark of the small hours and found the night cool and silent and still all around her, she felt a definite lurch of apprehension. Suppose she was dreaming? Suppose it was all some elaborate joke?
Well, it was too late to worry about that. She was committed. She lifted out the rucksack she’d often taken on camping journeys in Scotland and the Alps, and reflected that at least she knew how to survive out of doors; if worst came to worst, she could always run away, take to the hills.…
Ridiculous.
But she swung the rucksack onto her back, left the car, turned into the Banbury Road, and walked the two or three hundred yards up to where Sunderland Avenue ran left from the rotary. She felt almost more foolish than she had ever felt in her life.
But as she turned the corner and saw those strange childlike trees that Will had seen, she knew that something at least was true about all this. Under the trees on the grass at the far side of the road there was a small square tent of red and white nylon, the sort that electricians put up to keep the rain off while they work, and parked close by was an unmarked white Transit van with darkened glass in the windows.
Better not hesitate. She walked straight across toward the tent. When she was nearly there, the back door of the van swung open and a policeman stepped out. Without his helmet he looked very young, and the streetlight under the dense green of the leaves above shone full on his face.
“Could I ask where you’re going, madam?” he said.
“Into that tent.”
“I’m afraid you can’t, madam. I’ve got orders not to let anyone near it.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad they’ve got the place protected. But I’m from the Department of Physical Sciences—Sir Charles Latrom asked us to make a preliminary survey and then report back before they look at it properly. It’s important that it’s done now while there aren’t many people around. I’m sure you understand the reasons for that.”
“Well, yes,” he said. “But have you got anything to show who you are?”
“Oh, sure,” she said, and swung the rucksack off her back to get at her pur
se. Among the items she had taken from the drawer in the laboratory was an expired library card of Oliver Payne’s. Fifteen minutes’ work at her kitchen table and the photograph from her own passport had produced something she hoped would pass for genuine. The policeman took the laminated card and looked at it closely.
“ ‘Dr. Olive Payne,’ ” he read. “Do you happen to know a Dr. Mary Malone?”
“Oh, yes. She’s a colleague.”
“Do you know where she is now?”
“At home in bed, if she’s got any sense. Why?”
“Well, I understand her position in your organization’s been terminated, and she wouldn’t be allowed through here. In fact, we’ve got orders to detain her if she tries. And seeing a woman, I naturally thought you might be her, if you see what I mean. Excuse me, Dr. Payne.”
“Ah, I see,” said Mary Malone.
The policeman looked at the card once more.
“Still, this seems all right,” he said, and handed it back. Nervous, wanting to talk, he went on. “Do you know what’s in there under that tent?”
“Well, not firsthand,” she said. “That’s why I’m here now.”
“I suppose it is. All right then, Dr. Payne.”
He stood back and let her unlace the flap of the tent. She hoped he wouldn’t see the shaking of her hands. Clutching the rucksack to her breast, she stepped through. Deceive the guardian—well, she’d done that; but she had no idea what she would find inside the tent. She was prepared for some sort of archaeological dig; for a dead body; for a meteorite. But nothing in her life or her dreams had prepared her for that square yard or so in midair, or for the silent sleeping city by the sea that she found when she stepped through it.
13
ÆSAHÆTTR
As the moon rose, the witches began their spell to heal Will’s wound.
They woke him and asked him to lay the knife on the ground where it caught a glitter of starlight. Lyra sat nearby stirring some herbs in a pot of boiling water over a fire, and while her companions clapped and stamped and cried in rhythm, Serafina crouched over the knife and sang in a high, fierce tone:
“Little knife! They tore your iron
out of Mother Earth’s entrails,
built a fire and boiled the ore,
made it weep and bleed and flood,
hammered it and tempered it,
plunging it in icy water,
heating it inside the forge
till your blade was blood-red, scorching!
Then they made you wound the water
once again, and yet again,
till the steam was boiling fog
and the water cried for mercy.
And when you sliced a single shade
into thirty thousand shadows,
then they knew that you were ready,
then they called you subtle one.
“But little knife, what have you done?
Unlocked blood-gates, left them wide!
Little knife, your mother calls you,
from the entrails of the earth,
from her deepest mines and caverns,
from her secret iron womb.
Listen!”
And Serafina stamped again and clapped her hands with the other witches, and they shook their throats to make a wild ululation that tore at the air like claws. Will, seated in the middle of them, felt a chill at the core of his spine.
Then Serafina Pekkala turned to Will himself, and took his wounded hand in both of hers. When she sang this time, he nearly flinched, so fierce was her high, clear voice, so glittering her eyes; but he sat without moving, and let the spell go on.
“Blood! Obey me! Turn around,
be a lake and not a river.
When you reach the open air,
stop! And build a clotted wall,
build it firm to hold the flood back.
Blood, your sky is the skull-dome,
your sun is the open eye,
your wind the breath inside the lungs,
blood, your world is bounded. Stay there!”
Will thought he could feel all the atoms of his body responding to her command, and he joined in, urging his leaking blood to listen and obey.
She put his hand down and turned to the little iron pot over the fire. A bitter steam was rising from it, and Will heard the liquid bubbling fiercely.
Serafina sang:
“Oak bark, spider silk,
ground moss, saltweed—
grip close, bind tight,
hold fast, close up,
bar the door, lock the gate,
stiffen the blood-wall,
dry the gore-flood.”
Then the witch took her own knife and split an alder sapling along its whole length. The wounded whiteness gleamed open in the moon. She daubed some of the steaming liquid into the split, then closed up the wood, easing it together from the root to the tip. And the sapling was whole again.
Will heard Lyra gasp, and turned to see another witch holding a squirming, struggling hare in her tough hands. The animal was panting, wild-eyed, kicking furiously, but the witch’s hands were merciless. In one she held its forelegs and with the other she grasped its hind legs and pulled the frenzied hare out straight, its heaving belly upward.
Serafina’s knife swept across it. Will felt himself grow dizzy, and Lyra was restraining Pantalaimon, hare-formed himself in sympathy, who was bucking and snapping in her arms. The real hare fell still, eyes bulging, breast heaving, entrails glistening.
But Serafina took some more of the decoction and trickled it into the gaping wound, and then closed up the wound with her fingers, smoothing the wet fur over it until there was no wound at all.
The witch holding the animal relaxed her grip and let it gently to the ground, where it shook itself, turned to lick its flank, flicked its ears, and nibbled a blade of grass as if it were completely alone. Suddenly it seemed to become aware of the circle of witches around it, and like an arrow it shot away, whole again, bounding swiftly off into the dark.
Lyra, soothing Pantalaimon, glanced at Will and saw that he knew what it meant: the medicine was ready. He held out his hand, and as Serafina daubed the steaming mixture on the bleeding stumps of his fingers he looked away and breathed in sharply several times, but he didn’t flinch.
Once his open flesh was thoroughly soaked, the witch pressed some of the sodden herbs onto the wounds and tied them tight around with a strip of silk.
And that was it; the spell was done.
Will slept deeply through the rest of the night. It was cold, but the witches piled leaves over him, and Lyra slept huddled close behind his back. In the morning Serafina dressed his wound again, and he tried to see from her expression whether it was healing, but her face was calm and impassive.
Once they’d eaten, Serafina told the children that the witches had agreed that since they’d come into this world to find Lyra and be her guardians, they’d help Lyra do what she now knew her task to be: namely, to guide Will to his father.
So they all set off; and it was quiet going for the most part. Lyra consulted the alethiometer to begin with, but warily, and learned that they should travel in the direction of the distant mountains they could see across the great bay. Never having been this high above the city, they weren’t aware of how the coastline curved, and the mountains had been below the horizon; but now when the trees thinned, or when a slope fell away below them, they could look out to the empty blue sea and to the high blue mountains beyond, which were their destination. It seemed a long way to go.
They spoke little. Lyra was busy looking at all the life in the forest, from woodpeckers to squirrels to little green moss snakes with diamonds down their backs, and Will needed all his energy simply to keep going. Lyra and Pantalaimon discussed him endlessly.
“We could look at the alethiometer,” Pantalaimon said at one point when they’d dawdled on the path to see how close they could get to a browsing fawn before it saw them. “We never promised not to
. And we could find out all kinds of things for him. We’d be doing it for him, not for us.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Lyra said. “It would be us we’d be doing it for, ’cause he’d never ask. You’re just greedy and nosy, Pan.”
“That makes a change. It’s normally you who’s greedy and nosy, and me who has to warn you not to do things. Like in the retiring room at Jordan. I never wanted to go in there.”
“If we hadn’t, Pan, d’you think all this would have happened?”
“No. ’Cause the Master would have poisoned Lord Asriel, and that would’ve been the end of it.”
“Yeah, I suppose.… Who d’you think Will’s father is, though? And why’s he important?”
“That’s what I mean! We could find out in a moment!”
And she looked wistful. “I might have done once,” she said, “but I’m changing, I think, Pan.”
“No you’re not.”
“You might not be.… Hey, Pan, when I change, you’ll stop changing. What’re you going to be?”
“A flea, I hope.”
“No, but don’t you get any feelings about what you might be?”
“No. I don’t want to, either.”
“You’re sulking because I won’t do what you want.”
He changed into a pig and grunted and squealed and snorted till she laughed at him, and then he changed into a squirrel and darted through the branches beside her.
“Who do you think his father is?” Pantalaimon said. “D’you think he could be anyone we met?”
“Could be. But he’s bound to be someone important, almost as important as Lord Asriel. Bound to be. We know what we’re doing is important, after all.”
“We don’t know it,” Pantalaimon pointed out. “We think it is, but we don’t know. We just decided to look for Dust because Roger died.”
“We know it’s important!” Lyra said hotly, and she even stamped her foot. “And so do the witches. They come all this way to look for us just to be my guardians and help me! And we got to help Will find his father. That’s important. You know it is, too, else you wouldn’t have licked him when he was wounded. Why’d you do that, anyway? You never asked me if you could. I couldn’t believe it when you did that.”
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