The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) (29 page)

She put her pen away and tore up the page. The question was, she thought, was the universe alive or dead?

From somewhere far off on the marshes came the cry of an owl.

Lyra found herself thinking, What does that mean? and simultaneously thought of Talbot’s inevitable reply: “It doesn’t mean anything.” Some years before, in Oxford, she’d had an encounter with the dæmon of a witch, in a little adventure that had culminated in her thinking that everything meant something, if only she could read it. The universe had seemed alive then. There were messages to be read everywhere you looked. Something like the cry of an owl out on the marshes would have been blazing with significance.

Had she just been
wrong
then to feel that? Or immature, naive, sentimental? Simon Talbot would have said both, but charmingly, delicately, wittily. Devastatingly.

She had no answer. A tiny spark of consciousness in the oceanic night, and with her dæmon merely a projection of her unconscious mind, having no real existence at all, wherever he might be now, Lyra felt as unhappy and alone as she had ever done in her life.

“But where is she?”

Marcel Delamare asked the question with enormous and unconcealed patience. The lamplight, glaring from over his shoulder full in the face of Olivier Bonneville, disclosed a hint of clamminess, of pallor, of physical unease in the young man. Delamare was glad to see it: he meant to make Bonneville even more uneasy before the interview was over.

“I can’t pinpoint her,” Bonneville snapped. “The alethiometer doesn’t work like that. I know she’s traveling, and I know she’s going east. More than that, no one could tell.”

“Why not?” Very patiently indeed.

“Because the old method, which is the one you want me to use, Monsieur Delamare, is static. It’s based on a set of relationships which may be very complex but are fixed.” He stopped and stood up.

“Where are you going?” said Delamare.

“I’m damned if I’m going to be interrogated with that light in my eyes. I’ll sit over here.” He slouched to the sofa next to the fireplace. “If you’d let me use the new method, I could find her in no time,” he went on, putting his feet up on the tapestry-covered stool. “That’s dynamic. It allows for movement. It makes all the difference.”

“Take your feet off that stool. Turn to face me so I can see whether you’re lying.”

In response, Bonneville lay back along the sofa, his head on one arm, his feet on the other. He stared at Delamare briefly, and then put his head back and gazed at the ceiling, nibbling at a fingernail.

“You don’t look well,” said the Secretary General. “You look as if you’ve got a hangover. Have you been drinking to excess?”

“Kind of you to ask,” said Bonneville.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

Delamare took a deep breath and sighed. “The point is this,” he said. “You are doing very little work. The last report you filed was nearly empty of useful content. Our arrangement will come to an end this Friday, unless by then you’ve made a real and relevant discovery.”

“What d’you mean, our arrangement? What arrangement?”

“The arrangement by which you are using the alethiometer. The privilege can easily be—”

“You want to take it away? A lot of good that’ll do you. There’s no one half as quick as me, even with the old method. If you—”

“It’s no longer simply a question of speed. I don’t trust you, Bonneville. For a while you seemed to promise an advantage. Now, because of your self-indulgent posturing, that advantage has disappeared. The Belacqua girl has eluded us, and you seem to have no—”

“All right, then,” Bonneville said, and stood up. He looked paler than ever. “Have it your own way. Take the alethiometer. Send someone round in the morning to collect it. You’ll regret it. You’ll say sorry, you’ll beg and plead, but I won’t lift a finger. I’ve had enough.”

He picked up a cushion from the sofa and seemed about to throw it, probably into the fire; but he just dropped it on the floor and sauntered out.

Delamare tapped his fingers on the desk. It hadn’t gone the way he’d planned, and he blamed himself. Once again Bonneville had outwitted, or to be more accurate, out-insolenced him. Unfortunately, the boy was quite right: none of the other alethiometrists was a patch on him for speed or accuracy, and none had mastered the new method. Even though Delamare mistrusted it, he had to admit that the new method had produced some startling results. He suspected that Bonneville was using it despite his prohibition.

Perhaps, the Secretary General thought, it had been a mistake to rely so closely on the alethiometer. The older methods of spying still worked, as they had done for centuries, and the Magisterium’s intelligence network was powerful and had a long reach, with agents throughout Europe and across Asia Minor, as well as further east. Perhaps it was time to awaken them. Events were soon going to move fast in the Levant; it would be a wise precaution to put every agent on the alert.

He called in his secretary and dictated several notes. Then he put on his overcoat and hat and went out.

Marcel Delamare’s private life was intensely discreet. It was known that he was not married and assumed that he was not homosexual, but that was all. He had few friends and no hobbies, didn’t collect ceramics or play bridge or attend the opera. A man of his age and state of health might normally be expected to have a mistress, or to visit a brothel occasionally, but no whispers of that sort ever attended his name. The fact was that journalists didn’t find him a very promising subject. He was a dull functionary working in an obscure department of the Magisterium, and that was all. The papers had long given up hope of gaining readers by writing about Monsieur Delamare.

So no one followed when he went out for an evening walk, or saw him ring the bell of a large house in a quiet suburb, or watched as he was admitted by a woman in the habit of a nun. The light that came on over the door just before she opened it was exceptionally dim.

The nun said, “Good evening, Monsieur Delamare. Madame is expecting you.”

“How is she?”

“Adjusting to the new medication, we hope, monsieur. The pain is a little better.”

“Good,” said Delamare, handing her his coat and hat. “I’ll go straight up.”

He climbed the carpeted staircase and knocked at a door in a softly lit passageway. A voice from inside told him to enter.

“Maman,” he said, and bent over the old woman in the bed.

She turned her cheek to receive the kiss. Her wrinkled lizard dæmon drew back on the pillow, as if there were the slightest danger that Delamare might kiss him too. The room was close and hot, and smelled oppressively of lily of the valley, pungently of embrocation, and faintly of physical decay. Madame Delamare was extremely thin, for reasons of fashion, and had once been handsome. Her sparse yellow hair was stiffly coiffed and she was immaculately made up, though a tiny amount of the scarlet lipstick had seeped into the tight lines that led away from her mouth, and no amount of cosmetics could conceal the savagery in her eyes.

Delamare sat on the chair next to the bed.

“Well?” his mother said.

“Not yet.”

“Well, where was she last seen? And when?”

“In Oxford some days ago.”

“You’ll have to do a great deal better than
that,
Marcel. You are too busy with this congress. When is it going to finish?”

“When I’ve had my way,” he said calmly. He was beyond being irritated by his mother, and a long way beyond being frightened of her. He knew it was safe to discuss the progress of his various projects with her, because no one trusted her enough to believe her if she spoke about them. Besides, her opinions were usefully merciless.

“What were you discussing today?” she said, flicking an imaginary speck of dust from the dove-gray silk of her nightgown.

“The doctrine of embodiment. Where is the boundary between matter and spirit? What is the difference?”

She was too well bred to sneer, exactly; her lips remained pursed; but her eyes blazed with contempt.

“I should have thought that was
perfectly
clear,” she said. “If you and your colleagues need to indulge in that sort of adolescent speculation, you’ve wasted your time, Marcel.”

“No doubt. If it’s clear to you, Maman, what
is
the difference?”

“Matter is dead, of course. Only the
spirit
gives life. Without spirit, or soul, the universe would be a wasteland of emptiness and silence. But you know this as well as I do. Why are you asking about this? Are you tempted by what these
roses
seem to reveal?”

“Tempted? No, I don’t think I’m tempted. But I do think we need to reckon with it.”

“
Reckon
with it? What does
that
mean?”

She was most alive when she was animated by venom. Now she was sick and old, he enjoyed provoking her, as one might tease a scorpion that was safely behind glass.

“It means we have to consider what to do about it,” he went on. “There are several things we could do. First, we could suppress all knowledge of it, by rigorous investigation, by ruthless force. That would work for a while, but knowledge is like water: it always finds gaps to leak through. There are too many people, too many journals, too many places of learning, who already know something about it.”

“You should have suppressed it already.”

“No doubt you’re right. The second possibility is to go to the root of the problem and wipe it out. There is something unexplained in that desert in Central Asia. The roses will not grow anywhere else, and we don’t know why. Well, we could send a force to go there and destroy the place, whatever it is. The amount of rose oil that’s ever come this far is very small; supplies of it would dry up and cease altogether, and the problem would wither away. That solution would take longer and cost more than the first, but we could do it, and it would be final.”

“I think that is the
least
you should do. Your sister would not hesitate.”

“Many things would be much better if Marisa had lived. But there we are. There is a third option.”

“And what is that?”

“We could embrace the facts.”

“What on
earth
does that mean? What
facts
?”

“The roses exist; they show us something we’ve always denied, something that contradicts the deepest truths we know about the Authority and his creation; there is no doubt about that. So we could admit it boldly, contradict the teachings of millennia, proclaim a new truth.”

The old woman shuddered with revulsion. Her lizard dæmon began to weep, uttering little croaks of terror and despair.

“Marcel, you will withdraw those words
at once,
” his mother snapped. “I do not want to have heard them. Take them back. I
refuse
to listen to this heresy.”

He watched and said nothing, enjoying her distress. She began to breathe in hoarse, shallow gasps. She gestured with a fluttering hand, and the sleeve of her nightgown fell back to show her forearm punctured with needle marks, the skin like tissue paper, loose around the bone. Her eyes were glittering with malice.

“Nurse,” she whispered. “Call the nurse.”

“The nurse can do nothing about heresy. Calm down. You’re not in your second childhood yet. In any case, I haven’t told you the fourth option.”

“Well?”

“Revealing the truth in the way I’ve described it would not work. There are too many habits, ways of thought, institutions, that are committed to the way things are and always have been. The truth would be swept away at once. Instead, we should delicately and subtly undermine the idea that truth and facts are possible in the first place. Once the people have become doubtful about the truth of anything, all kinds of things will be open to us.”

“ ‘
Delicately
and
subtly,
’ ” she mocked. “Marisa would know how to show some force. Some
character.
She was all the man you’ll never be.”

“My sister is dead. Meanwhile, I am alive, and in a position to command the course of events. I’m telling you about what I’m going to do because you won’t live to see it.”

His mother began to snivel. “Why are you talking to me like this?” she whined. “So cruel.”

“I’ve wanted to be able to treat you like this all my life.”

“
Wallowing
in childish resentment,” she said shakily, mopping her eyes and nose with a lace handkerchief. “I have powerful friends, Marcel. Pierre Binaud came to see me only last week. Be careful how you behave.”

“When I hear you now, I hear Binaud’s voice. You were sleeping with that old goat when I was a boy. The pair of you must make a fine spectacle these days.”

She whimpered and struggled to sit up a little higher. He didn’t offer to help. Her lizard dæmon lay panting on the pillow.

“I want a nurse,” the old woman said. “I’m
suffering.
You’re making me so unhappy, I can’t tell you. You only come here to
torment
 me.”

“I shan’t stay long. I’ll tell the nurse to give you a sleeping draft.”

“Oh no—no—such fearful dreams!”

Her dæmon gave a little shriek and tried to nuzzle her breast, but she pushed him away. Delamare stood up and looked around.

“You should really let some fresh air in here,” he said.

“Don’t be unpleasant.”

“What are you going to do with the girl once I’ve got her for you?”

“Wring the truth out of her. Punish her. Make her truly sorry. Then, when I’ve broken her will, I shall
educate
her properly. Give her a true sense of who she is and what her priorities should be. Mold her into the woman her
mother
should have lived to be.”

“And Binaud? What part will he play in this educational enterprise?”

“I’m getting tired, Marcel. You don’t realize how much I’m suffering.”

“I want to know what Binaud plans to do with the girl.”

“It’s got nothing to do with him.”

“Of course it has. The man is corrupt. He reeks of furtive copulation.”

“Pierre Binaud is a
man.
You wouldn’t know what that means. And he loves me.”