His Dark Materials Omnibus (45 page)

She twisted her lips. It was like being back at Jordan, being quizzed on something she’d been half-taught. “Sort of,” she said.

“No, you don’t. Go to the shelf beside the desk and bring me the Bible.”

Lyra did so, and handed the big black book to her father.

“You do remember the story of Adam and Eve?”

“ ’Course,” she said. “She wasn’t supposed to eat the fruit and the serpent tempted her, and she did.”

“And what happened then?”

“Umm … They were thrown out. God threw them out of the garden.”

“God had told them not to eat the fruit, because they would die. Remember, they were naked in the garden, they were like children, their dæmons took on any form they desired. But this is what happened.”

He turned to Chapter Three of Genesis, and read:

“And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

“But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die
.

“And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and your dæmons shall assume their true forms, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil
.

“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to reveal the true form of one’s dæmon, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat
.

“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they saw the true form of their dæmons, and spoke with them
.

“But when the man and the woman knew their own dæmons, they knew that a great change had come upon them, for until that moment it had seemed that they
were at one with all the creatures of the earth and the air, and there was no difference between them:

“And they saw the difference, and they knew good and evil; and they were ashamed, and they sewed fig leaves together to cover their nakedness
.…
”

He closed the book.

“And that was how sin came into the world,” he said, “sin and shame and death. It came the moment their dæmons became fixed.”

“But …” Lyra struggled to find the words she wanted: “but it en’t
true
, is it? Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn’t
really
an Adam and Eve? The Cassington Scholar told me it was just a kind of fairy tale.”

“The Cassington Scholarship is traditionally given to a freethinker; it’s his function to challenge the faith of the Scholars. Naturally he’d say that. But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it.

“Anyway, it’s what the Church has taught for thousands of years. And when Rusakov discovered Dust, at last there was a physical proof that something happened when innocence changed into experience.

“Incidentally, the Bible gave us the name Dust as well. At first they were called Rusakov Particles, but soon someone pointed out a curious verse toward the end of the Third Chapter of Genesis, where God’s cursing Adam for eating the fruit.”

He opened the Bible again and pointed it out to Lyra. She read:

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return
.…
”

Lord Asriel said, “Church scholars have always puzzled over the translation of that verse. Some say it should read not ‘unto dust shalt thou return’ but ‘thou shalt be subject to dust,’ and others say the whole verse is a kind of pun on the words ‘ground’ and ‘dust,’ and it really means that God’s admitting his own nature to be partly sinful. No one agrees. No one can, because the text is corrupt. But it was too good a word to waste, and that’s why the particles became known as Dust.”

“And what about the Gobblers?” Lyra said.

“The General Oblation Board … Your mother’s gang. Clever of her to spot the chance of setting up her own power base, but she’s a clever woman, as I dare say you’ve noticed. It suits the Magisterium to allow all
kinds of different agencies to flourish. They can play them off against one another; if one succeeds, they can pretend to have been supporting it all along, and if it fails, they can pretend it was a renegade outfit which had never been properly licensed.

“You see, your mother’s always been ambitious for power. At first she tried to get it in the normal way, through marriage, but that didn’t work, as I think you’ve heard. So she had to turn to the Church. Naturally she couldn’t take the route a man could have taken—priesthood and so on—it had to be unorthodox; she had to set up her own order, her own channels of influence, and work through that. It was a good move to specialize in Dust. Everyone was frightened of it; no one knew what to do; and when she offered to direct an investigation, the Magisterium was so relieved that they backed her with money and resources of all kinds.”

“But they were
cutting
—” Lyra couldn’t bring herself to say it; the words choked in her mouth. “You know what they were doing! Why did the Church let them do anything like that?”

“There was a precedent. Something like it had happened before. Do you know what the word
castration
means? It means removing the sexual organs of a boy so that he never develops the characteristics of a man. A castrato keeps his high treble voice all his life, which is why the Church allowed it: so useful in Church music. Some castrati became great singers, wonderful artists. Many just became fat spoiled half-men. Some died from the effects of the operation. But the Church wouldn’t flinch at the idea of a little
cut
, you see. There was a precedent. And this would be so much more
hygienic
than the old methods, when they didn’t have anesthetics or sterile bandages or proper nursing care. It would be gentle by comparison.”

“It isn’t!” Lyra said fiercely. “It isn’t!”

“No. Of course not. That’s why they had to hide away in the far North, in darkness and obscurity. And why the Church was glad to have someone like your mother in charge. Who could doubt someone so charming, so well-connected, so sweet and reasonable? But because it was an obscure and unofficial kind of operation, she was someone the Magisterium could deny if they needed to, as well.”

“But whose idea was it to do that
cutting
in the first place?”

“It was hers. She guessed that the two things that happen at adolescence might be connected: the change in one’s dæmon and the fact that Dust began to settle. Perhaps if the dæmon were separated from the body, we might never be subject to Dust—to original sin. The question was whether
it was possible to separate dæmon and body without killing the person. But she’s traveled in many places, and seen all kinds of things. She’s traveled in Africa, for instance. The Africans have a way of making a slave called a
zombi
. It has no will of its own; it will work day and night without ever running away or complaining. It looks like a corpse.…”

“It’s a person without their dæmon!”

“Exactly. So she found out that it was possible to separate them.”

“And … Tony Costa told me about the horrible phantoms they have in the northern forests. I suppose they might be the same kind of thing.”

“That’s right. Anyway, the General Oblation Board grew out of ideas like that, and out of the Church’s obsession with original sin.”

Lord Asriel’s dæmon twitched her ears, and he laid his hand on her beautiful head.

“There was something else that happened when they made the cut,” he went on. “And they didn’t see it. The energy that links body and dæmon is immensely powerful. When the cut is made, all that energy dissipates in a fraction of a second. They didn’t notice, because they mistook it for shock, or disgust, or moral outrage, and they trained themselves to feel numb towards it. So they missed what it could do, and they never thought of harnessing it.…”

Lyra couldn’t sit still. She got up and walked to the window, and stared over the wide bleak darkness with unseeing eyes. They were too cruel. No matter how important it was to find out about original sin, it was too cruel to do what they’d done to Tony Makarios and all the others. Nothing justified that.

“And what were
you
doing?” she said. “Did you do any of that cutting?”

“I’m interested in something quite different. I don’t think the Oblation Board goes far enough. I want to go to the source of Dust itself.”

“The source? Where’s it come from, then?”

“From the other universe we can see through the Aurora.”

Lyra turned around again. Her father was lying back in his chair, lazy and powerful, his eyes as fierce as his dæmon’s. She didn’t love him, she couldn’t trust him, but she had to admire him, and the extravagant luxury he’d assembled in this desolate wasteland, and the power of his ambition.

“What is that other universe?” she said.

“One of uncountable billions of parallel worlds. The witches have known about them for centuries, but the first theologians to prove their existence mathematically were excommunicated fifty or more years ago. However, it’s true; there’s no possible way of denying it.

“But no one thought it would ever be possible to cross from one universe to another. That would violate fundamental laws, we thought. Well, we were wrong; we learned to see the world up there. If light can cross, so can we. And we had to
learn
to see it, Lyra, just as you learned to use the alethiometer.

“Now that world, and every other universe, came about as a result of possibility. Take the example of tossing a coin: it can come down heads or tails, and we don’t know before it lands which way it’s going to fall. If it comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.

“But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart. I’m using the example of tossing a coin to make it clearer. In fact, these possibility collapses happen at the level of elementary particles, but they happen in just the same way: one moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don’t exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which they
did
happen.

“And I’m going to that world beyond the Aurora,” he said, “because I think that’s where all the Dust in this universe comes from. You saw those slides I showed the Scholars in the retiring room. You saw Dust pouring into this world from the Aurora. You’ve seen that city yourself. If light can cross the barrier between the universes, if Dust can, if we can see that city, then we can build a bridge and cross. It needs a phenomenal burst of energy. But I can do it. Somewhere out there is the origin of all the Dust, all the death, the sin, the misery, the destructiveness in the world. Human beings can’t see anything without wanting to destroy it, Lyra.
That’s
original sin. And I’m going to destroy it. Death is going to die.”

“Is that why they put you here?”

“Yes. They are terrified. And with good reason.”

He stood up, and so did his dæmon, proud and beautiful and deadly. Lyra sat still. She was afraid of her father, and she admired him profoundly, and she thought he was stark mad; but who was she to judge?

“Go to bed,” he said. “Thorold will show you where to sleep.”

He turned to go.

“You’ve left the alethiometer,” she said.

“Ah, yes; I don’t actually need that now,” he said. “It would be no use to me without the books anyway. D’you know, I think the Master of Jordan was giving it to
you
. Did he actually ask you to bring it to me?”

“Well, yes!” she said. But then she thought again, and realized that in fact the Master never had asked her to do that; she had assumed it all the time,
because why else would he have given it to her? “No,” she said. “I don’t know. I thought—”

“Well, I don’t want it. It’s yours, Lyra.”

“But—”

“Goodnight, child.”

Speechless, too bewildered by this to voice any of the dozen urgent questions that pressed at her mind, she sat by the fire and watched him leave the room.

She woke to find a stranger shaking her arm, and then as Pantalaimon sprang awake and growled, she recognized Thorold. He was holding a naphtha lamp, and his hand was trembling.

“Miss—miss—get up quickly. I don’t know what to do. He’s left no orders. I think he’s mad, miss.”

“What? What’s happening?”

“Lord Asriel, miss. He’s been almost in a delirium since you went to bed. I’ve never seen him so wild. He packed a lot of instruments and batteries in a sledge and he harnessed up the dogs and left. But he’s got the boy, miss!”