The Subtle Knife (9 page)

“I got to go,” she said. “Thank you for offering, but I better not. Anyway, I got to go now because I’m meeting someone. My friend,” she added. “Who I’m staying with.”

“Yes, of course,” he said kindly. “Well, it was nice talking to you. Bye-bye, Lizzie.”

“Bye,” she said.

“Oh, just in case, here’s my name and address,” he said, handing her a card. “Just in case you want to know more about things like this.”

“Thank you,” she said blandly, and put it in the little pocket on the back of her rucksack before leaving. She felt he was watching her all the way out.

Once she was outside the museum, she turned in to the park, which she knew as a field for cricket and other sports, and found a quiet spot under some trees and tried the alethiometer again.

This time she asked where she could find a Scholar who knew about Dust. The answer she got was simple: it directed her to a certain room in the tall square building behind her. In fact, the answer was so straightforward, and came so abruptly, that Lyra was sure the alethiometer had more to say: she was beginning to sense now that it had moods, like a person, and to know when it wanted to tell her more.

And it did now. What it said was:
You must concern yourself with the boy. Your task is to help him find his father. Put your mind to that.

She blinked. She was genuinely startled. Will had appeared out of nowhere in order to help her; surely that was obvious. The idea that
she
had come all this way in order to help
him
took her breath away.

But the alethiometer still hadn’t finished. The needle twitched again, and she read:
Do not lie to the Scholar.

She folded the velvet around the alethiometer and thrust it into the rucksack out of sight. Then she stood and looked around for the building where her Scholar would be found, and set off toward it, feeling awkward and defiant.

Will found the library easily enough, where the reference librarian was perfectly prepared to believe that he was doing some research for a school geography project and helped him find the bound copies of
The Times
index for the year of his birth, which was when his father had disappeared. Will sat down to look through them. Sure enough, there were several references to John Parry, in connection with an archaeological expedition.

Each month, he found, was on a separate roll of microfilm. He threaded each in turn into the projector, scrolled through to find the stories, and read them with fierce attention. The first story told of the departure of an expedition to the north of Alaska. The expedition was sponsored by the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford University, and it was going to survey an area in which they hoped to find evidence of early human settlements. It was accompanied by John Parry, late of the Royal Marines, a professional explorer.

The second story was dated six weeks later. It said briefly that the expedition had reached the North American Arctic Survey Station at Noatak in Alaska.

The third was dated two months after that. It said that there had been no reply to signals from the Survey Station, and that John Parry and his companions were presumed missing.

There was a brief series of articles following that one, describing the parties that had set out fruitlessly to look for them, the search flights over the Bering Sea, the reaction of the Institute of Archaeology, interviews with relatives . . . . 

His heart thudded, because there was a picture of his own mother. Holding a baby. Him.

The reporter had written a standard tearful-wife-waiting-in-anguish-for-news story, which Will found disappointingly short of actual facts. There was a brief paragraph saying that John Parry had had a successful career in the Royal Marines and had left to specialize in organizing geographical and scientific expeditions, and that was all.

There was no other mention in the index, and Will got up from the microfilm reader baffled. There must be some more information somewhere else; but where could he go next? And if he took too long searching for it, he’d be traced . . . . 

He handed back the rolls of microfilm and asked the librarian, “Do you know the address of the Institute of Archaeology, please?”

“I could find out . . . . What school are you from?”

“St. Peter’s,” said Will.

“That’s not in Oxford, is it?”

“No, it’s in Hampshire. My class is doing a sort of residential field trip. Kind of environmental study research skills.”

“Oh, I see. What was it you wanted? . . . Archaeology? . . . Here we are.”

Will copied down the address and phone number, and since it was safe to admit he didn’t know Oxford, asked where to find it. It wasn’t far away. He thanked the librarian and set off.

Inside the building Lyra found a wide desk at the foot of the stairs, with a porter behind it.

“Where are you going?” he said.

This was like home again. She felt Pan, in her pocket, enjoying it.

“I got a message for someone on the second floor,” she said.

“Who?”

“Dr. Lister,” she said.

“Dr. Lister’s on the third floor. If you’ve got something for him, you can leave it here and I’ll let him know.”

“Yeah, but this is something he needs right now. He just sent for it. It’s not a
thing
actually, it’s something I need to tell him.”

He looked at her carefully, but he was no match for the bland and vacuous docility Lyra could command when she wanted to; and finally he nodded and went back to his newspaper.

The alethiometer didn’t tell Lyra people’s names, of course. She had read the name Dr. Lister off a pigeonhole on the wall behind him, because if you pretend you know someone, they’re more likely to let you in. In some ways Lyra knew Will’s world better than he did.

On the second floor she found a long corridor, where one door was open to an empty lecture hall and another to a smaller room where two Scholars stood discussing something at a blackboard. These rooms, the walls of this corridor, were all flat and bare and plain in a way Lyra thought belonged to poverty, not to the scholarship and splendor of Oxford; and yet the brick walls were smoothly painted, and the doors were of heavy wood and the banisters were of polished steel, so they were costly. It was just another way in which this world was strange.

She soon found the door the alethiometer had told her about. The sign on it said D
ARK
M
ATTER
R
ESEARCH
U
NIT
, and under it someone had scribbled R.I.P. Another hand had added in pencil D
IRECTOR
: L
AZARUS
.

Lyra made nothing of that. She knocked, and a woman’s voice said, “Come in.”

It was a small room, crowded with tottering piles of papers and books, and the whiteboards on the walls were covered in figures and equations. Tacked to the back of the door was a design that looked Chinese. Through an open doorway Lyra could see another room, where some kind of complicated anbaric machinery stood in silence.

For her part, Lyra was a little surprised to find that the Scholar she sought was female, but the alethiometer hadn’t said a man, and this was a strange world, after all. The woman was sitting at an engine that displayed figures and shapes on a small glass screen, in front of which all the letters of the alphabet had been laid out on grimy little blocks in an ivory tray. The Scholar tapped one, and the screen became blank.

“Who are you?” she said.

Lyra shut the door behind her. Mindful of what the alethiometer had told her, she tried hard not to do what she normally would have done, and she told the truth.

“Lyra Silvertongue,” she answered. “What’s your name?”

The woman blinked. She was in her late thirties, Lyra supposed, perhaps a little older than Mrs. Coulter, with short black hair and red cheeks. She wore a white coat open over a green shirt and those blue canvas trousers so many people wore in this world.

At Lyra’s question the woman ran a hand through her hair and said, “Well, you’re the second unexpected thing that’s happened today. I’m Dr. Mary Malone. What do you want?”

“I want you to tell me about Dust,” said Lyra, having looked around to make sure they were alone. “I know you know about it. I can prove it. You got to tell me.”

“Dust? What are you talking about?”

“You might not call it that. It’s elementary particles. In my world the Scholars call it Rusakov Particles, but normally they call it Dust. They don’t show up easily, but they come out of space and fix on people. Not children so much, though. Mostly on grownups. And something I only found out today—I was in that museum down the road and there was some old skulls with holes in their heads, like the Tartars make, and there was a lot more Dust around them than around this other one that hadn’t got that sort of hole in. When’s the Bronze Age?”

The woman was looking at her wide-eyed.

“The Bronze Age? Goodness, I don’t know; about five thousand years ago,” she said.

“Ah, well, they got it wrong then, when they wrote that label. That skull with the two holes in it is thirty-three thousand years old.”

She stopped then, because Dr. Malone looked as if she was about to faint. The high color left her cheeks completely; she put one hand to her breast while the other clutched the arm of her chair, and her jaw dropped.

Lyra stood, stubborn and puzzled, waiting for her to recover.

“Who are you?” the woman said at last.

“Lyra Silver—”

“No, where d’you come from? What are you? How do you know things like this?”

Wearily Lyra sighed; she had forgotten how roundabout Scholars could be. It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.

“I come from another world,” she began. “And in that world there’s an Oxford like this, only different, and that’s where I come from. And—”

“Wait, wait, wait. You come from where?”

“From somewhere else,” said Lyra, more carefully. “Not here.”

“Oh, somewhere else,” the woman said. “I see. Well, I think I see.”

“And I got to find out about Dust,” Lyra explained. “Because the Church people in my world, right, they’re frightened of Dust because they think it’s original sin. So it’s very important. And my father . . . No,” she said passionately, and stamped her foot. “That’s
not
what I meant to say. I’m doing it all wrong.”

Dr. Malone looked at Lyra’s desperate frown and clenched fists, at the bruises on her cheek and her leg, and said, “Dear me, child, calm down.”

She broke off and rubbed her eyes, which were red with tiredness.

“Why am I listening to you?” she went on. “I must be crazy. The fact is, this is the only place in the world where you’d get the answer you want, and they’re about to close us down. What you’re talking about, your Dust, sounds like something we’ve been investigating for a while now, and what you say about the skulls in the museum gave me a turn, because . . . oh, no, this is just too much. I’m too tired. I want to listen to you, believe me, but not now, please. Did I say they were going to close us down? I’ve got a week to put together a proposal to the funding committee, but we haven’t got a hope in hell . . . ”

She yawned widely.

“What was the first unexpected thing that happened today?” Lyra said.

“Oh. Yes. Someone I’d been relying on to back our funding application withdrew his support. I don’t suppose it was
that
unexpected, anyway.”

She yawned again.

“I’m going to make some coffee,” she said. “If I don’t, I’ll fall asleep. You’ll have some too?”

She filled an electric kettle, and while she spooned instant coffee into two mugs Lyra stared at the Chinese pattern on the back of the door.

“What’s that?” she said.

“It’s Chinese. The symbols of the I Ching. D’you know what that is? Do they have that in your world?”

Lyra looked at her narrow-eyed, in case she was being sarcastic. She said: “There are some things the same and some that are different, that’s all. I don’t know everything about my world. Maybe they got this Ching thing there too.”

“I’m sorry,” said Dr. Malone. “Yes, maybe they have.”

“What’s dark matter?” said Lyra. “That’s what it says on the sign, isn’t it?”

Dr. Malone sat down again, and hooked another chair out with her ankle for Lyra.

She said, “Dark matter is what my research team is looking for. No one knows what it is. There’s more stuff out there in the universe than we can see, that’s the point. We can see the stars and the galaxies and the things that shine, but for it all to hang together and not fly apart, there needs to be a lot more of it—to make gravity work, you see. But no one can detect it. So there are lots of different research projects trying to find out what it is, and this is one of them.”

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.