The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2)

by Philip Pullman

  “Lyra? What d’you mean?”

  “She seems perfectly cheerful on the surface. Full of, you know, chatter, friendliness. Then sometimes she’ll fall quiet and her whole face changes. It’s as if she’s just had some bad news.”

  “No,” said his wife, “it’s not like that. She doesn’t look shocked. She looks lonely. She looks as if she’s used to it and doesn’t expect anything else, but that’s what she is. Melancholy.”

  “She doesn’t hardly ever speak to that dæmon either,” he said. “It’s as if they’re two separate people.”

  “She was such a happy baby. Laughing, singing, full of fun…Mind you, that was before, you know.”

  “Before Malcolm’s voyage. Well, he was different after that. So was Alice.”

  “But you’d expect them to be more affected, seeing as they were older. She was just a baby. They don’t remember things. And she is being badly treated by that college. It’s her home—you’d think they’d take better care. Not surprising she’s a bit subdued.”

  “I wonder if she’s got any relatives. Malcolm says her father and mother are both long dead.”

  “If she’s got any uncles or aunts or cousins, I don’t think much of them,” said Mrs. Polstead.

  “Why?”

  “They should have got in touch. A long time ago. It’s an unnatural life for a young girl, cooped up with a lot of old Scholars.”

  “Maybe she has got relatives, and they don’t care about her. She’d be better off without ’em in that case.”

  “Possibly. Tell you one thing, though—she’s a hard worker. I’ll have to find something particular for her to do. She does Pauline’s couple of jobs quicker and better than Pauline, and Pauline’s going to feel shoved aside unless I give Lyra something different.”

  “We don’t need her to work. She could stay as a guest, welcome, far as I’m concerned.”

  “Me too, love, but it’s not for us, it’s for her. She’s got her college work, but she needs to feel useful. I’m trying to think of something extra, something that wouldn’t get done at all if she didn’t do it.”

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right. I’ll have a think. Night, sweetheart.”

  He turned over. She read a detective story for five minutes, found her eyelids drooping, and put the light out.

  * * *

  * * *

  Hannah Relf didn’t know it, but Lyra had been experimenting with the new method of reading the alethiometer. This new method wasn’t a matter of public knowledge, because there was little public discussion of the alethiometer, but among the small groups of experts, it was a topic of excited speculation.

  The instrument in her possession was the one Malcolm had found in Gerard Bonneville’s rucksack, and then thrust in among the baby Lyra’s blankets when Lord Asriel had handed her to the Master of Jordan. The Master had given it to Lyra when she was eleven, and she’d taken it with her on the great adventure in the Arctic and beyond. At first, she learnt to read it intuitively, as if it was the most natural thing in the world; but before very long she lost the power to do that, and she was left unable to see all the connections and similarities that had once been so clear beneath the symbols on the dial.

  The loss of that power was painful. It was a consolation, though a poor, thin one, to know that by diligent study she’d be able to regain some of the ability to read it; but she’d always need the books in which generations of scholars had set down their discoveries about the symbols and the links between them. The contrast, though! It was like losing the power to fly through the air like a swift, and being compensated with a crutch to help her limp along the ground.

  And that contributed to her melancholy. Mrs. Polstead was right: melancholy was Lyra’s state of mind these days, and since her rift with Pan, she’d had no one to talk to about it. How absurd it was, that the two of them were one person, and yet they found it so hard to talk together or even endure each other’s company in silence. More and more she found herself whispering to a phantom, to her idea of what Will was like now in that unreachable world of his.

  So the new style of alethiometric technique had come as a welcome distraction. It had spread by rumor, no one knew from whom or from where; but there were stories about dramatic advances in understanding, of a revolution in theory, of sensational feats of readership where the books were simply redundant, superfluous. And Lyra privately began to experiment.

  On their second night at the Trout, she was sitting in bed, knees drawn up, blankets around her against the cold, the alethiometer in her loosely cupped hands. The low, sloping ceiling of the bedroom, the wallpaper with its pattern of little flowers, the old worn rug beside the bed—they felt comfortably familiar already, and the gentle yellow light from the naphtha lamp beside her made the room feel warmer than a thermometer would have shown. Pan was sitting beneath the lamp; in the old days, he would have been curled up warmly between her breasts.

  “What are you doing?” he said. His tone was hostile.

  “I’m going to try the new method again.”

  “Why? Last time it made you sick.”

  “I’m exploring. Trying things out.”

  “I don’t like the new method, Lyra.”

  “But why?”

  “Because when you do it, you look as if you’re lost. I can’t tell where you are. And I don’t think you know where you are. You need more imagination.”

  “What?”

  “If you had more imagination, it would be better. But—”

  “What are you saying? You’re saying I haven’t got any imagination?”

  “You’re trying to live without it, that’s what I’m saying. It’s those books again. One of them saying it doesn’t exist, the other saying it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “No, no…”

  “Well, if you don’t want my opinion, don’t ask me about it.”

  “But I didn’t…” She didn’t know what to say. She felt powerfully upset. He was just looking at her expressionlessly. “What should I do?” she said.

  She meant about us. But in response he said, “Well, you have to be able to imagine. But in your case, that’s not easy, is it?”

  “I don’t…I really have no…Pan, I just don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s as if we’re speaking different languages. It doesn’t connect with…”

  “What were you going to look up anyway?”

  “I’m not sure anymore. You’ve confused me. But something’s wrong with things. I suppose I was going to see if I could find out what it is.”

  He looked away, and slowly moved his tail from side to side, and then he turned away altogether and sprang onto the old chintz-covered armchair and curled up to sleep.

  No imagination? Trying to live without imagination? She had never in her life thought about what her imagination might be. If she had, she might have supposed that that aspect of her self resided more in Pan, because she was practical, matter-of-fact, down-to-earth….But how did she know that? Other people seemed to regard her as being those things, or at least they treated her as if they did. She had friends she would have called imaginative: they were witty, or they said surprising things, or they daydreamed a lot. Wasn’t she like that? Evidently not. She had no idea it would hurt so much to be told she had no imagination.

  But Pan had said it was because of those books. It was true, the narrative of The Hyperchorasmians treated with contempt the characters who were artistic, or who wrote poetry, or who spoke about “the spiritual.” Did Gottfried Brande mean that imagination itself was worthless? Lyra couldn’t remember if he ever mentioned it directly: she’d have to look through the book and see. As for Simon Talbot, in The Constant Deceiver his own imagination was on display throughout, in a kind of charming but heartless play with the truth. The effect was dazzling, dizzying, as if there were no responsibilities, no consequences
, no facts.

  She sighed. She was holding the alethiometer loosely in both hands, letting her thumbs move across the knurled wheels, sensing the familiar weight, half watching the reflection of the lamplight move as she turned it this way and that.

  “Well, Pan, I tried,” she said, but very quietly. “And so did you, for a bit. You just couldn’t keep going. You’re not really interested. What are we going to do? We can’t go on like this. Why do you hate me so much? Why do I hate you? Why can’t we stand being with each other?”

  She was no longer sleepy, just wide awake and unhappy.

  “Well,” she whispered, “it won’t make any difference now.”

  She sat up a little, held the alethiometer more purposefully. There were two points of difference between the new method and the classical one. The first had to do with the placing of the hands on the dial. The classical method required the reader to frame a question by pointing each of the hands at a different symbol, and thus define precisely what it was they wanted to know. But with the new method, all three hands were pointed at one symbol, chosen by the reader. This was felt by classically trained readers to be grossly unorthodox and disrespectful of tradition, besides being unstable; instead of the steady and methodical inquiry made possible by the firmly based triangle of the three hands, the single anchor-hold of the new method allowed a wild and unpredictable chaos of meanings to emerge as the needle darted rapidly from place to place.

  The second point of difference had to do with the attitude of the reader. The classical method required a careful, watchful, but relaxed state of mind, which took a good deal of practice to manage. After all, part of the reader’s attention had to be available for consulting the books that laid out the multiple meanings of each symbol. The new method, on the other hand, didn’t need the books at all. The reader had to abandon control and enter a state of passive vision where nothing was fixed and everything was equally possible. This was the reason why both Hannah and Lyra had had to stop soon after beginning their experiments with it: they’d felt horribly seasick.

  Now, sitting in bed and thinking about it, Lyra felt apprehensive.

  “Could it go wrong?” she whispered, and, “I could get lost and never come back….”

  Yes, that was a risk. Without a fixed perspective or a solid place to stand, it might be like drowning in a wild sea.

  In a spirit of mingled desperation and reluctance, she turned the wheels until all three hands pointed to the horse. She didn’t know why. Then she held the alethiometer and closed her eyes, letting her mind fall forward like a diver off a high cliff.

  “Don’t look for a firm place—go into the flow—be with it—let it surge through me—in and out again—there’s nothing firm—no perspective…,” she muttered to herself.

  Images from the dial swung at her and past her, and swung away again. Now she was upside down, now she was soaring, now plummeting into a terrible depth. Images she had known well for almost half her life lowered at her with an alien glare or hid themselves in mist. She let herself drift, float, tumble, holding on to nothing. It was dark and then it was dazzling. She was on an endless plain studded with fossilized emblems under a vast moon. She was in a forest resounding with animal cries and human screams and the whisper of terrified ghosts. Ivy climbed up to envelop the sun and pull it down into a meadow where an angry black bull snorted and stamped.

  Through it all she drifted, intentionless, free from any human feeling. Scene after scene unfolded, banal, tender, horrible, and she watched them all, interested but detached. She wondered if she was dreaming, and whether it mattered, and how she could tell what was significant from what was trivial and accidental.

  “I don’t know!” she whispered.

  She had begun to feel that horrible sickness which seemed to be the inevitable consequence of using the new method. She put the instrument down at once and breathed deeply till the nausea passed.

  There must be a better way, she thought. Clearly something was happening, though it was hard to tell what it was. She wondered what she’d ask if she had some of the books with her and could consult the old authorities about framing a question and interpreting the answer, and at once she knew: she’d ask about the cat in the dream. Was she Will’s dæmon, and if so, what did that mean?

  She felt uncomfortable to think that, though. The universal skepticism that she’d learnt from Brande and Talbot, in their different ways, made her sternly reject the world of dreams and occult significances. They were childish things, worthless rubbish.

  But what was the alethiometer itself, if not a way into that very world? She was horribly divided.

  Nevertheless, that shadow-colored cat on the moonlit lawn…

  She took it up again and turned all three hands to point to the bird, which stood for dæmons in general. She closed her eyes again and cradled the instrument in her lap, holding it without any tension. She tried to summon the mood of the dream, which wasn’t hard; in fact, it clung to her mind like a delicate perfume. How the dæmon had come towards her, confident and happy, offering her head for Lyra’s knuckles to rub; how her fur had felt almost charged with adoration; how she knew the dæmon was Kirjava, and she was allowed to touch her because she loved Will, and how Will must be nearby…

  At once the scene changed. Still entranced, she found herself in an elegant building, in a corridor, with windows opening onto a narrow courtyard below, where a large limousine gleamed in the winter sunshine. The walls of the corridor were painted or distempered a pale chalky green in the pale sunshine of a winter afternoon.

  And there was the cat dæmon again!

  Or…just a cat, sitting calmly this time, watching her. Not Kirjava. As Lyra in a fire of hope and disappointment moved towards her, the cat turned and stalked away towards an open door. Lyra followed. Through the doorway she saw a book-lined room where a young man was holding an alethiometer, and it was—

  “Will!” she said aloud.

  She couldn’t help it. His black hair, his strong jaw, the tense way he held his shoulders—and then he looked up at her, and it wasn’t Will but someone else, about her age, slim, fierce, arrogant. And he had a dæmon who wasn’t a cat: she was a sparrowhawk, perching on the back of his chair, staring at her with yellow eyes. Where was Kirjava now? Lyra looked around: the cat had vanished. A flicker of suspicious recognition passed between Lyra and the young man, but they were recognizing different things: he knew her to be the girl his employer Marcel Delamare wanted so badly for some reason, the girl who had his own father’s alethiometer, and she knew him to be the inventor of the new method.

  Before he could move, she reached in and pulled the door shut between them.

  Then she blinked and shook her head, and found herself in the warm bed at the Trout. She was weak from wonder, and giddy with shock. He had been so like Will—that first moment, what a burst of joy in her breast! And then what a sickening disappointment, followed at once by an uneasy lurch of surprise, that she knew where that place was, and what he was doing, and who he was. And where had the cat gone? Why had she been there, anyway? Was she leading Lyra to the young man?

  She didn’t notice Pan sitting up tensely, watching her, in the chair beside the bed.

  She put the alethiometer on the bedside table and reached for paper and pencil. Working quickly, while the vision was already fading from her mind, she wrote down everything she could.

  Pan watched her for a minute or two and then quietly curled up again in the armchair. He hadn’t shared her pillow for several nights.

  * * *

  * * *

  He didn’t move till Lyra finished writing and turned out the light, and then he waited a little longer till her steady breathing told him she was asleep. Then he recovered a tattered little notebook from the larger book in which he’d hidden it, and held it firmly in his teeth as he jumped up to the windowsill.

 
He had already inspected the window, which was not a sash but a casement with a simple iron catch, so he didn’t need Lyra’s help to open it. A moment later he was outside on the old stone tiles, and then a leap into an apple tree, a dart across a lawn, a scamper across the bridge, and soon he was running freely in the wide expanse of Port Meadow towards the distant campanile of St. Barnabas’s Oratory, pale against the night sky. He darted through a group of sleeping ponies, making them shift uneasily: perhaps one of them was the animal whose back he’d leapt on the year before, digging his claws in till the poor creature galloped in a frenzy and finally threw him off, and he’d landed on the grass laughing with delight. That was something Lyra knew nothing about.

  Just as she knew nothing about the little notebook he was carrying in his teeth. It was the one from Dr. Hassall’s rucksack, the one filled with names and addresses, and he’d hidden it away because he’d seen something in it that she hadn’t noticed; and having hidden it, he found that the best time to tell her about it hadn’t yet arrived.

  He ran on, light and tireless and silent, until he reached the canal that ran along the eastern edge of the meadow. Rather than swim across and risk the notebook, he slipped through the grass until he came to the little bridge across to Walton Well Road and the streets of Jericho. He’d have to be very careful from now on; it wasn’t yet midnight, there were several pubs still open, and the yellow streetlights at each corner would have made it impossible to hide if he’d gone that way.

  Instead, he kept to the towpath, moving swiftly and stopping frequently to look and listen, until he came to an iron-barred gate on the left. He was through it in a moment, into the grounds of the Eagle Ironworks, whose great buildings loomed high above him. A narrow path led to a similar gate that opened next to the end of Juxon Street, which consisted of a terrace of small brick houses built for the workers at the ironworks or the Fell Press nearby. Pan stayed inside the gate, in the shadow of the buildings, because two men were talking in the street.