His Dark Materials Omnibus (143 page)

Suppose that all this time, little by little, Dust had been leaking out of the wounds the subtle knife had made in nature …

She felt dizzy, and it wasn’t only the swaying and rising and falling of the branches she was wedged among. She put the spyglass carefully in her pocket and hooked her arms over the branch in front, gazing at the sky, the moon, the scudding clouds.

The subtle knife was responsible for the small-scale, low-level leakage. It was damaging, and the universe was suffering because of it, and she must talk to Will and Lyra and find a way to stop it.

But the vast flood in the sky was another matter entirely. That was new, and it was catastrophic. And if it wasn’t stopped, all conscious life would come to an end. As the
mulefa
had shown her, Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves; but it needed some feedback system to reinforce it and make it safe, as the
mulefa
had their wheels and the oil from the trees. Without something like that, it would all vanish. Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow away, leaving nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly.

Mary felt the burden of it keenly. It felt like age. She felt eighty years old, worn out and weary and longing to die.

She climbed heavily out of the branches of the great fallen tree, and with the wind still wild in the leaves and the grass and her hair, set off back to the village.

At the summit of the slope she looked for the last time at the Dust stream, with the clouds and the wind blowing across it and the moon standing firm in the middle.

And then she saw what they were doing, at last: she saw what that great urgent purpose was.

They were trying to hold back the Dust flood. They were striving to put some barriers up against the terrible stream: wind, moon, clouds, leaves, grass, all those lovely things were crying out and hurling themselves into the struggle to keep the shadow particles in this universe, which they so enriched.

Matter
loved
Dust. It didn’t want to see it go. That was the meaning of this night, and it was Mary’s meaning, too.

Had she thought there was no meaning in life, no purpose, when God had gone? Yes, she had thought that.

“Well, there is now,” she said aloud, and again, louder: “There is now!”

As she looked again at the clouds and the moon in the Dust flow, they looked as frail and doomed as a dam of little twigs and tiny pebbles trying to hold back the Mississippi. But they were trying, all the same. They’d go on trying till the end of everything.

How long she stayed out, Mary didn’t know. When the intensity of her feeling began to subside, and exhaustion took its place, she made her way slowly down the hill toward the village.

And when she was halfway down, near a little grove of knot-wood bushes, she saw something strange out on the mudflats. There was a glow of white, a steady movement: something coming up with the tide.

She stood still, gazing intently. It couldn’t be the
tualapi
, because they always moved in a flock, and this was on its own. But everything about it was the same—the sail-like wings, the long neck—it was one of the birds, no doubt about it. She had never heard of their moving about alone, and she hesitated before running down to warn the villagers, because the thing had stopped, in any case. It was floating on the water close to the path.

And it was coming apart … No, something was getting off its back.

The something was a man.

She could see him quite clearly, even at that distance; the moonlight was brilliant, and her eyes were adjusted to it. She looked through the spyglass, and put the matter beyond doubt: it was a human figure, radiating Dust.

He was carrying something: a long stick of some kind. He came along the
path quickly and easily, not running, but moving like an athlete or a hunter. He was dressed in simple dark clothes that would normally conceal him well; but through the spyglass he showed up as if he were under a spotlight.

And as he came closer to the village, she realized what that stick was. He was carrying a rifle.

She felt as if someone had poured icy water over her heart. Every separate hair on her flesh stirred.

She was too far away to do anything: even if she’d shouted, he wouldn’t have heard. She had to watch as he stepped into the village, looking to the left and right, stopping every so often to listen, moving from house to house.

Mary’s mind felt like the moon and the clouds trying to hold back the Dust as she cried out silently: Don’t look under the tree—go away from the tree—

But he moved closer and closer to it, finally stopping outside her own house. She couldn’t bear it; she put the spyglass in her pocket and began to run down the slope. She was about to call out, anything, a wild cry, but just in time she realized that it might wake Will or Lyra and make them reveal themselves, and she choked it back.

Then, because she couldn’t bear not knowing what the man was doing, she stopped and fumbled for the spyglass again, and had to stand still while she looked through it.

He was opening the door of her house. He was going inside it. He vanished from sight, although there was a stir in the Dust he left behind, like smoke when a hand is passed through it. Mary waited for an endless minute, and then he appeared again.

He stood in her doorway, looking around slowly from left to right, and his gaze swept past the tree.

Then he stepped off the threshold and stood still, almost at a loss. Mary was suddenly conscious of how exposed she was on the bare hillside, an easy rifle shot away, but he was only interested in the village; and when another minute or so had gone by, he turned and walked quietly away.

She watched every step he took down the river path, and saw quite clearly how he stepped onto the bird’s back and sat cross-legged as it turned to glide away. Five minutes later they were lost to sight.

“Dr. Malone,” said Lyra in the morning, “Will and me have got to look for our dæmons. When we’ve found them, we’ll know what to do. But we can’t be without them for much longer. So we just want to go and look.”

“Where will you go?” said Mary, heavy-eyed and headachy after her disturbed night. She and Lyra were on the riverbank, Lyra to wash, and Mary to look, surreptitiously, for the man’s footprints. So far she hadn’t found any.

“Don’t know,” said Lyra. “But they’re out there somewhere. As soon as we came through from the battle, they ran away as if they didn’t trust us anymore. Can’t say I blame them, either. But we know they’re in this world, and we thought we saw them a couple of times, so maybe we can find them.”

“Listen,” Mary said reluctantly, and told Lyra about the man she’d seen the night before.

As she spoke, Will came to join them, and both he and Lyra listened, wide-eyed and serious.

“He’s probably just a traveler and he found a window and wandered through from somewhere else,” Lyra said when Mary had finished. “Like Will’s father did. There’s bound to be all kinds of openings now. Anyway, if he just turned around and left, he can’t have meant to do anything bad, can he?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t like it. And I’m worried about you going off on your own—or I would be if I didn’t know you’d already done far more dangerous things than that. Oh, I don’t know. But please be careful. Please look all around. At least out on the prairie you can see someone coming from a long way off …”

“If we do, we can escape straight away into another world, so he won’t be able to hurt us,” Will said.

They were determined to go, and Mary was reluctant to argue.

“At least,” she said, “promise that you won’t go in among the trees. If that
man is still around, he might be hiding in a wood or a grove and you wouldn’t see him in time to escape.”

“We promise,” said Lyra.

“Well, I’ll pack you some food in case you’re out all day.”

Mary took some flat bread and cheese and some sweet, thirst-quenching red fruits, wrapped them in a cloth, and tied a cord around it for one of them to carry over a shoulder.

“Good hunting,” she said as they left. “Please take care.”

She was still anxious. She stood watching them all the way to the foot of the slope.

“I wonder why she’s so sad,” Will said as he and Lyra climbed the road up to the ridge.

“She’s probably wondering if she’ll ever go home again,” said Lyra. “And if her laboratory’ll still be hers when she does. And maybe she’s sad about the man she was in love with.”

“Mmm,” said Will. “D’you think
we’ll
ever go home?”

“Dunno. I don’t suppose I’ve got a home anyway. They probably couldn’t have me back at Jordan College, and I can’t live with the bears or the witches. Maybe I could live with the gyptians. I wouldn’t mind that, if they’d have me.”

“What about Lord Asriel’s world? Wouldn’t you want to live there?”

“It’s going to fail, remember,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because of what your father’s ghost said, just before we came out. About dæmons, and how they can only live for a long time if they stay in their own world. But probably Lord Asriel, I mean my father, couldn’t have thought about that, because no one knew enough about other worlds when he started … All that,” she said wonderingly, “all that bravery and skill … All that, all wasted! All for nothing!”

They climbed on, finding the going easy on the rock road, and when they reached the top of the ridge, they stopped and looked back.

“Will,” she said, “supposing we
don’t
find them?”

“I’m sure we will. What I’m wondering is what my dæmon will be like.”

“You saw her. And I picked her up,” Lyra said, blushing, because of course it was a gross violation of manners to touch something so private as someone else’s dæmon. It was forbidden not only by politeness, but by something deeper than that—something like shame. A quick glance at Will’s warm cheeks showed that he knew that just as well as she did.

They walked on side by side, suddenly shy with each other. But Will, not put off by being shy, said, “When does your dæmon stop changing shape?”

“About … I suppose about our age, or a bit older. Maybe more sometimes. We used to talk about Pan settling, him and me. We used to wonder what he’d be—”

“Don’t people have any idea?”

“Not when they’re young. As you grow up you start thinking, well, they might be this or they might be that … And usually they end up something that fits. I mean something like your real nature. Like if your dæmon’s a dog, that means you like doing what you’re told, and knowing who’s boss, and following orders, and pleasing people who are in charge. A lot of servants are people whose dæmons are dogs. So it helps to know what you’re like and to find what you’d be good at. How do people in
your
world know what they’re like?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know much about my world. All I know is keeping secret and quiet and hidden, so I don’t know much about … grownups, and friends. Or lovers. I think it’d be difficult having a dæmon because everybody would know so much about you just by looking. I like to keep secret and stay out of sight.”

“Then maybe your dæmon’d be an animal that’s good at hiding. Or one of those animals that looks like another—a butterfly that looks like a wasp, for disguise. They must have creatures like that in your world, because we have, and we’re so much alike.”

They walked on together in a friendly silence. All around them the wide, clear morning lay limpid in the hollows and pearly blue in the warm air above. As far as the eye could see, the great savanna rolled, brown, gold, buff-green, shimmering toward the horizon, and empty. They might have been the only people in the world.

“But it’s not empty really,” Lyra said.

“You mean that man?”

“No. You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do. I can see shadows in the grass … maybe birds,” Will said.

He was following the little darting movements here and there. He found it easier to see the shadows if he didn’t look at them. They were more willing to show themselves to the corners of his eye, and when he said so to Lyra, she said, “It’s negative capability.”

“What’s that?”

“The poet Keats said it first. Dr. Malone knows. It’s how I read the alethiometer. It’s how you use the knife, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it is. But I was just thinking that they might be the dæmons.”

“So was I, but …”

She put her finger to her lips. He nodded.

“Look,” he said, “there’s one of those fallen trees.”

It was Mary’s climbing tree. They went up to it carefully, keeping an eye on the grove in case another one should fall. In the calm morning, with only a faint breeze stirring the leaves, it seemed impossible that a mighty thing like this should ever topple, but here it was.

The vast trunk, supported in the grove by its torn-up roots and out on the grass by the mass of branches, was high above their heads. Some of those branches, crushed and broken, were themselves as big around as the biggest trees Will had ever seen; the crown of the tree, tight-packed with boughs that still looked sturdy, leaves that were still green, towered like a ruined palace into the mild air.