His Dark Materials 02 - The Subtle Knife

by Philip Pullman

  Lyra was all focused attention. At last the woman was talking seriously.

  “And what do you think it is?” she asked.

  “Well, what we think it is—” As she began, the kettle boiled, so she got up and made the coffee as she continued. “We think it’s some kind of elementary particle. Something quite different from anything discovered so far. But the particles are very hard to detect . . . . Where do you go to school? Do you study physics?”

  Lyra felt Pantalaimon nip her hand, warning her not to get cross. It was all very well, the alethiometer telling her to be truthful, but she knew what would happen if she told the whole truth. She had to tread carefully and just avoid direct lies.

  “Yes,” she said, “I know a little bit. But not about dark matter.”

  “Well, we’re trying to detect this almost-undetectable thing among the noise of all the other particles crashing about. Normally they put detectors very deep underground, but what we’ve done instead is to set up an electromagnetic field around the detector that shuts out the things we don’t want and lets through the ones we do. Then we amplify the signal and put it through a computer.”

  She handed across a mug of coffee. There was no milk and no sugar, but she did find a couple of ginger biscuits in a drawer, and Lyra took one hungrily.

  “And we found a particle that fits,” Dr. Malone went on. “We think it fits. But it’s so strange . . . Why am I telling you this? I shouldn’t. It’s not published, it’s not refereed, it’s not even written down. I’m a little crazy this afternoon.

  “Well . . . ” she went on, and she yawned for so long that Lyra thought she’d never stop, “our particles are strange little devils, make no mistake. We call them shadow particles, Shadows. You know what nearly knocked me off my chair just now? When you mentioned the skulls in the museum. Because one of our team, you see, is a bit of an amateur archaeologist. And he discovered something one day that we couldn’t believe. But we couldn’t ignore it, because it fitted in with the craziest thing of all about these Shadows. You know what? They’re conscious. That’s right. Shadows are particles of consciousness. You ever heard anything so stupid? No wonder we can’t get our grant renewed.”

  She sipped her coffee. Lyra was drinking in every word like a thirsty flower.

  “Yes,” Dr. Malone went on, “they know we’re here. They answer back. And here goes the crazy part: you can’t see them unless you expect to. Unless you put your mind in a certain state. You have to be confident and relaxed at the same time. You have to be capable— Where’s that quotation . . . ”

  She reached into the muddle of papers on her desk and found a scrap on which someone had written with a green pen. She read:

  “ ‘ . . . Capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ You have to get into that state of mind. That’s from the poet Keats, by the way. I found it the other day. So you get yourself in the right state of mind, and then you look at the Cave—”

  “The cave?” said Lyra.

  “Oh, sorry. The computer. We call it the Cave. Shadows on the walls of the Cave, you see, from Plato. That’s our archaeologist again. He’s an all-around intellectual. But he’s gone off to Geneva for a job interview, and I don’t suppose for a moment he’ll be back . . . . Where was I? Oh, the Cave, that’s right. Once you’re linked up to it, if you think, the Shadows respond. There’s no doubt about it. The Shadows flock to your thinking like birds . . . . ”

  “What about the skulls?”

  “I was coming to that. Oliver Payne—him, my colleague—was fooling about one day testing things with the Cave. And it was so odd. It didn’t make any sense in the way a physicist would expect. He got a piece of ivory, just a lump, and there were no Shadows with that. It didn’t react. But a carved ivory chess piece did. A big splinter of wood off a plank didn’t, but a wooden ruler did. And a carved wooden statuette had more . . . . I’m talking about elementary particles here, for goodness’ sake. Little minute lumps of scarcely anything. They knew what these objects were. Anything that was associated with human workmanship and human thought was surrounded by Shadows . . . .

  “And then Oliver—Dr. Payne—got some fossil skulls from a friend at the museum and tested them to see how far back in time the effect went. There was a cutoff point about thirty, forty thousand years ago. Before that, no Shadows. After that, plenty. And that’s about the time, apparently, that modern human beings first appeared. I mean, you know, our remote ancestors, but people no different from us, really . . . . ”

  “It’s Dust,” said Lyra authoritatively. “That’s what it is.”

  “But, you see, you can’t say this sort of thing in a funding application if you want to be taken seriously. It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It’s impossible, and if it isn’t impossible, it’s irrelevant, and if it isn’t either of those things, it’s embarrassing.”

  “I want to see the Cave,” said Lyra.

  She stood up.

  Dr. Malone was running her hands through her hair and blinking hard to keep her tired eyes clear.

  “Well, I can’t see why not,” she said. “We might not have a Cave tomorrow. Come along through.”

  She led Lyra into the other room. It was larger, and crowded with anbaric equipment.

  “This is it. Over there,” she said, pointing to a screen that was glowing an empty gray. “That’s where the detector is, behind all that wiring. To see the Shadows, you have to be linked up to some electrodes. Like for measuring brain waves.”

  “I want to try it,” said Lyra.

  “You won’t see anything. Anyway, I’m tired. It’s too complicated.”

  “Please! I know what I’m doing!”

  “Do you, now? I wish I did. No, for heaven’s sake. This is an expensive, difficult scientific experiment. You can’t come charging in here and expect to have a go as if it were a pinball machine . . . . Where do you come from, anyway? Shouldn’t you be at school? How did you find your way in here?”

  And she rubbed her eyes again, as if she was only just waking up.

  Lyra was trembling. Tell the truth, she thought. “I found my way in with this,” she said, and took out the alethiometer.

  “What in the world is that? A compass?”

  Lyra let her take it. Dr. Malone’s eyes widened as she felt the weight.

  “Dear Lord, it’s made of gold. Where on earth—”

  “I think it does what your Cave does. That’s what I want to find out. If I can answer a question truly,” said Lyra desperately, “something you know the answer to and I don’t, can I try your Cave then?”

  “What, are we into fortune-telling now? What is this thing?”

  “Please! Just ask me a question!”

  Dr. Malone shrugged. “Oh, all right,” she said. “Tell me . . . tell me what I was doing before I took up this business.”

  Eagerly Lyra took the alethiometer from her and turned the winding wheels. She could feel her mind reaching for the right pictures even before the hands were pointing at them, and she sensed the longer needle twitching to respond. As it began to swing around the dial, her eyes followed it, watching, calculating, seeing down the long chains of meaning to the level where the truth lay.

  Then she blinked and sighed and came out of her temporary trance.

  “You used to be a nun,” she said. “I wouldn’t have guessed that. Nuns are supposed to stay in their convents forever. But you stopped believing in church things and they let you leave. This en’t like my world at all, not a bit.”

  Dr. Malone sat down in a chair by the computer, staring.

  Lyra said, “That’s true, en’t it?”

  “Yes. And you found out from that . . . ”

  “From my alethiometer. It works by Dust, I think. I came all this way to find out more about Dust, and it told me to come to you. So I reckon your dark matter must be the same thing. Now can I try your Cave?”

  Dr. Malone shook her head, but not to
say no, just out of helplessness. She spread her hands. “Very well,” she said. “I think I’m dreaming. I might as well carry on.”

  She swung around in her chair and pressed several switches, bringing an electrical hum and the sound of a computer’s cooling fan into the air; and at the sound of them, Lyra gave a little muffled gasp. It was because the sound in that room was the same sound she’d heard in that dreadful glittering chamber at Bolvangar, where the silver guillotine had nearly parted her and Pantalaimon. She felt him quiver in her pocket, and gently squeezed him for reassurance.

  But Dr. Malone hadn’t noticed; she was too busy adjusting switches and tapping the letters in another of those ivory trays. As she did, the screen changed color, and some small letters and figures appeared on it.

  “Now you sit down,” she said, and pulled out a chair for Lyra. Then she opened a jar and said, “I need to put some gel on your skin to help the electrical contact. It washes off easily. Hold still, now.”

  Dr. Malone took six wires, each ending in a flat pad, and attached them to various places on Lyra’s head. Lyra sat determinedly still, but she was breathing quickly, and her heart was beating hard.

  “All right, you’re all hooked up,” said Dr. Malone. “The room’s full of Shadows. The universe is full of Shadows, come to that. But this is the only way we can see them, when you make your mind empty and look at the screen. Off you go.”

  Lyra looked. The glass was dark and blank. She saw her own reflection dimly, but that was all. As an experiment she pretended that she was reading the alethiometer, and imagined herself asking: What does this woman know about Dust? What questions is she asking?

  She mentally moved the alethiometer’s hands around the dial, and as she did, the screen began to flicker. Astonished, she came out of her concentration, and the flicker died. She didn’t notice the ripple of excitement that made Dr. Malone sit up: she frowned and sat forward and began to concentrate again.

  This time the response came instantaneously. A stream of dancing lights, for all the world like the shimmering curtains of the aurora, blazed across the screen. They took up patterns that were held for a moment only to break apart and form again, in different shapes, or different colors; they looped and swayed, they sprayed apart, they burst into showers of radiance that suddenly swerved this way or that like a flock of birds changing direction in the sky. And as Lyra watched, she felt the same sense, as of trembling on the brink of understanding, that she remembered from the time when she was beginning to read the alethiometer.

  She asked another question: Is this Dust? Is it the same thing making these patterns and moving the needle of the alethiometer?

  The answer came in more loops and swirls of light. She guessed it meant yes. Then another thought occurred to her, and she turned to speak to Dr. Malone, and saw her open-mouthed, hand to her head.

  “What?” she said.

  The screen faded. Dr. Malone blinked.

  “What is it?” Lyra said again.

  “Oh—you’ve just put on the best display I’ve ever seen, that’s all,” said Dr. Malone. “What were you doing? What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking you could get it clearer than this,” Lyra said.

  “Clearer? That’s the clearest it’s ever been!”

  “But what does it mean? Can you read it?”

  “Well,” said Dr. Malone, “you don’t read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn’t work like that. What’s happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention that you pay them. That’s revolutionary enough; it’s our consciousness that they respond to, you see.”

  “No,” Lyra explained, “what I mean is, those colors and shapes up there. They could do other things, those Shadows. They could make any shapes you wanted. They could make pictures if you wanted them to. Look.”

  And she turned back and focused her mind again, but this time she pretended to herself that the screen was the alethiometer, with all thirty-six symbols laid out around the edge. She knew them so well now that her fingers automatically twisted in her lap as she moved the imaginary hands to point at the candle (for understanding), the alpha and omega (for language), and the ant (for diligence), and framed the question: What would these people have to do in order to understand the language of the Shadows?

  The screen responded as quickly as thought itself, and out of the welter of lines and flashes a series of pictures formed with perfect clarity: compasses, alpha and omega again, lightning, angel. Each picture flashed up a different number of times, and then came a different three: camel, garden, moon.

  Lyra saw their meanings clearly, and unfocused her mind to explain. This time, when she turned around, she saw that Dr. Malone was sitting back in her chair, white-faced, clutching the edge of the table.

  “What it says,” Lyra told her, “it’s saying in my language, right—the language of pictures. Like the alethiometer. But what it says is that it could use ordinary language too, words, if you fixed it up like that. You could fix this so it put words on the screen. But you’d need a lot of careful figuring with numbers—that was the compasses, see. And the lightning meant anbaric—I mean, electric power, more of that. And the angel—that’s all about messages. There’s things it wants to say. But when it went on to that second bit . . . it meant Asia, almost the farthest east but not quite. I dunno what country that would be—China, maybe. And there’s a way they have in that country of talking to Dust, I mean Shadows, same as you got here and I got with the—I got with pictures, only their way uses sticks. I think it meant that picture on the door, but I didn’t understand it, really. I thought when I first saw it there was something important about it, only I didn’t know what. So there must be lots of ways of talking to Shadows.”

  Dr. Malone was breathless.

  “The I Ching,” she said. “Yes, it’s Chinese. A form of divination—fortune-telling, really . . . . And, yes, they use sticks. It’s only up there for decoration,” she said, as if to reassure Lyra that she didn’t really believe in it. “You’re telling me that when people consult the I Ching, they’re getting in touch with Shadow particles? With dark matter?”

  “Yeah,” said Lyra. “There’s lots of ways, like I said. I hadn’t realized before. I thought there was only one.”

  “Those pictures on the screen . . . ” Dr. Malone began.

  Lyra felt a flicker of a thought at the edge of her mind, and turned to the screen. She had hardly begun to formulate a question when more pictures flashed up, succeeding each other so quickly that Dr. Malone could hardly follow them; but Lyra knew what they were saying, and turned back to her.

  “It says that you’re important, too,” she told the scientist. “It says you got something important to do. I dunno what, but it wouldn’t say that unless it was true. So you probably ought to get it using words, so you can understand what it says.”

  Dr. Malone was silent. Then she said, “All right, where do you come from?”

  Lyra twisted her mouth. She realized that Dr. Malone, who until now had acted out of exhaustion and despair, would never normally have shown her work to a strange child who turned up from nowhere, and that she was beginning to regret it. But Lyra had to tell the truth.

  “I come from another world,” she said. “It’s true. I came through to this one. I was . . . I had to run away, because people in my world were chasing me, to kill me. And the alethiometer comes from . . . from the same place. The Master of Jordan College gave it me. In my Oxford there’s a Jordan College, but there en’t one here. I looked. And I found out how to read the alethiometer by myself. I got a way of making my mind go blank, and I just see what the pictures mean straightaway. Just like you said about . . . doubts and mysteries and that. So when I looked at the Cave, I done the same thing, and it works just the same way, so my Dust and your Shadows are the same, too. So . . . ”

  Dr. Malone was fully awake now. Lyra picked up the alethiometer and folded its velvet cloth over it, like a mother protecting her child, bef
ore putting it back in her rucksack.

  “So anyway,” she said, “you could make this screen so it could talk to you in words, if you wanted. Then you could talk to the Shadows like I talk to the alethiometer. But what I want to know is, why do the people in my world hate it? Dust, I mean, Shadows. Dark matter. They want to destroy it. They think it’s evil. But I think what they do is evil. I seen them do it. So what is it, Shadows? Is it good or evil, or what?”

  Dr. Malone rubbed her face and turned her cheeks red again.

  “Everything about this is embarrassing,” she said. “D’you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.”

  “You got to think about it,” said Lyra severely. “You can’t investigate Shadows, Dust, whatever it is, without thinking about that kind of thing, good and evil and such. And it said you got to, remember. You can’t refuse. When are they going to close this place down?”

  “The funding committee decides at the end of the week . . . . Why?”

  “ ’Cause you got tonight, then,” said Lyra. “You could fix this engine thing to put words on the screen instead of pictures like I made. You could do that easy. Then you could show ’em, and they’d have to give you the money to carry on. And you could find out all about Dust, or Shadows, and tell me. You see,” she went on a little haughtily, like a duchess describing an unsatisfactory housemaid, “the alethiometer won’t exactly tell me what I need to know. But you could find out for me. Else I could probably do that Ching thing, with the sticks. But pictures are easier to work. I think so, anyway. I’m going to take this off now,” she added, and pulled at the electrodes on her head.

  Dr. Malone gave her a tissue to wipe off the gel, and folded up the wires.

  “So you’re going?” she said. “Well, you’ve given me a strange hour, that’s no mistake.”

  “Are you going to make it do words?” Lyra said, gathering up her rucksack.

  “It’s about as much use as completing the funding application, I daresay,” said Dr. Malone. “No, listen. I want you to come back tomorrow. Can you do that? About the same time? I want you to show someone else.”