But Dr. Malone hadnt 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.
"Well ..." she went on, and she yawned for so long that Lyra thought shed 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 couldnt believe. But we couldnt ignore it, because it fitted in with the craziest thing of all about these Shadows. You know what? Theyre conscious. Thats right. Shadows are particles of consciousness. You ever heard anything so stupid? No wonder we cant get our grant renewed."
Lyra was all focused attention. At last the woman was talking seriously.
"Well," said Will, trying to keep calm, "I was just trying to find out about that expedition, really.
"Right, thanks," Will said, and turned to go.
" ... Capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. You have to get into that state of mind. Thats 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—"
There was a large museum nearby. Will went in, holding his clipboard as if he were working, and sat down in a gallery hung with paintings. He was trembling hard and feeling sick, because pressing at him was the knowledge that hed killed someone, that he was a murderer. Hed kept it at bay till now, but it was closing in. Hed taken away the mans life.
"I was thinking you could get it clearer than this," Lyra said.
"Im sorry," said Dr. Malone. "Yes, maybe they have."
"As far as I can remember, he was a big blond man. Very pale hair."
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:
He found he was shaking. The journalist, so called, was one of the men whod come to his house: a tall man with such fair hair that he seemed to have no eyebrows or eyelashes. He wasnt the one Will had knocked down the stairs: he was the one whod appeared at the door of the living room as Will ran down and jumped over the body.
"The I Ching," she said. "Yes, its Chinese. A form of divination—fortune-telling, really.... And, yes, they use sticks. Its only up there for decoration," she said, as if to reassure Lyra that she didnt really believe in it. "Youre telling me that when people consult the I Ching, theyre getting in touch with Shadow particles? With dark matter?"
"Yes. And you found out from that..."
She swung around in her chair and pressed several switches, bringing an electrical hum and the sound of a computers 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 shed 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.
"And thats all I can tell you, Im afraid."
"Why did he want to know about it?" he said.
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.
"You used to be a nun," she said. "I wouldnt 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 ent like my world at all, not a bit."
"What about the skulls?"
"Do you, now? I wish I did. No, for heavens sake. This is an expensive, difficult scientific experiment. You cant come charging in here and expect to have a go as if it were a pinball machine.... Where do you come from, anyway? Shouldnt you be at school? How did you find your way in here?"
"What in the world is that? A compass?"
"Yes. Of course. You will come?"
Lyra narrowed her eyes. Was this a trap?
Dr. Malone rubbed her face and turned her cheeks red again.
"What it says," Lyra told her, "its 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 youd need a lot of careful figuring with numbers—that was die compasses, see. And the lightning meant anbaric—I mean, electric power, more of that. And the angel— thats all about messages. Theres 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 theres 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 didnt understand it, really. I thought when I first saw it there was something important about it, only I didnt know what. So there must be lots of ways of talking to Shadows."
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.
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.
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....
"Everything about this is embarrassing" she said. "Dyou 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."
camel, garden, moon.
"The explorer type. A man called Parry."
Lyra said, "Thats true, ent it?"
Gradually he grew calmer. Hed been defending his mother. They were frightening her; given the state she was in, they were persecuting her. He had a right to defend his home. His father would have wanted him to do that. He did it because it was the good thing to do. He did it to stop them from stealing the green leather case. He did it so he could find his father; and didnt he have a right to do that? All his childish games came back to him, with himself and his father rescuing each other from avalanches or fighting pirates. Well, now it was real. Ill find you, he said in his mind. Just help me and Ill find you, and well look after Mum, and everythingll be all right....
"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 thats about the time, apparently, that modern human beings first appeared. I mean, you know, our remote ancestors, but people no different from us, really...."
She asked another question: Is this Dust? Is it the same thing making these patterns and moving the needle of the alethiometer?
"You got to think about it," said Lyra severely. "You cant 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 cant refuse. When are they going to close this place down?"
For a school project about prehistoric people. And I read about this expedition that disappeared, and I got curious."
Dr. Malone gave her a tissue to wipe off the gel, and folded up the wires.
She mentally moved the alethiometers 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 didnt notice the ripple of excitement that made Dr. Malone sit up: she frowned and sat forward and began to concentrate again.
She sipped her coffee. Lyra was drinking in every word like a thirsty flower.
And she left. The porter at the desk looked up briefly and then went back to his paper.
"Yeah," said Lyra. Theres lots of ways, like I said. I hadnt realized before. I thought there was only one."
What does this woman know about Dust? What questions is she asking?
"Yes," said Will. "Thank you. Umm ... that journalist," he went on, stopping at the door. "You said he was interested in one of the men. Which one was it?"
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:
Dr. Malone sat down in a chair by the computer, staring.
"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 theyd 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 wont 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.
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.
"So youre going?" she said. "Well, youve given me a strange hour, thats no mistake."
Dr. Malone took six wires, each ending in a flat pad, and attached them to various places on Lyras head. Lyra sat determinedly still, but she was breathing quickly, and her heart was beating hard.
"Please! Just ask me a question!"
Lyra was trembling. Tell the truth, she thought. "I found my way in with this," she said, and took out the alethiometer.
The tall man with the pale eyebrows was getting out of a car.
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:
"I want to see the Cave," said Lyra.
"But what does it mean? Can you read it?"
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.
The man watched him leave the room, saying nothing, frowning a little. Will saw him reach for the phone, and left the building quickly.
"Well, all right," she said. "But remember, theres things I need to know."
"Because ..." Will couldnt think of a plausible reason. He shouldnt have asked. "No reason. I just wondered."
"And we found a particle that fits," Dr. Malone went on. "We think it fits. But its so strange ...
Dr. Malone was fully awake now. Lyra picked up the alethiometer and folded its velvet cloth over it, like a mother protecting her child, before putting it back in her rucksack.
Dr. Malone sat down again, and hooked another chair out with her ankle for Lyra.
"It says that youre important, too," she told the scientist. "It says you got something important to do. I dunno what, but it wouldnt say that unless it was true. So you probably ought to get it using words, so you can understand what it says."
"But then they all vanished. They kept in radio contact with a local survey station, but one day the signal didnt come, and nothing more was heard. Thered been a buzzard, but that was nothing unusual. The search expedition found their last camp more or less intact, though the bears had eaten their stores. But there was no sign of the people whatsoever.
"I think he was a journalist. Im not sure."
"And what do you think it is?" she asked.
Archaeologists can deal with some things, but were not trained to shoot, and someone who can do that and navigate and make camp and do all the sort of survival stuff is very useful.
She stood up.
"What?" she said.
"Are you going to make it do words?" Lyra said, gathering up her rucksack.
"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."
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.
"Well," said Dr. Malone, "you dont read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesnt work like that. Whats happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention that you pay them.
She led Lyra into the other room. It was larger, and crowded with anbaric equipment.
But he wasnt a journalist.
"Yes," she said, "I know a little bit. But not about dark matter."
"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 didnt 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 didnt react. But a carved ivory chess piece did. A big splinter of wood off a plank didnt, but a wooden ruler did. And a carved wooden statuette had more.... Im talking about elementary panicles here, for goodness
"Now you sit down," she said, and pulled out a chair for Lyra. Then she opened ajar and said, "I need to put some gel on your skin to help the electrical contact. It washes off easily. Hold still, now."
"Who was the other one?" said Will, on his guard at once.
I think so, anyway. Im going to take this off now," she added, and pulled at the electrodes on her head.
Dr. Malone shrugged. "Oh, all right," she said. Tell me ... tell me what I was doing before I took up this business."
"Well, I cant see why not," she said. "We might not have a Cave tomorrow. Come along through."
And after all, he had somewhere to hide now, somewhere so safe no one would ever find him. And the papers from the case (which he still hadnt had time to read) were safe too, under the mattress in Cittagazze.
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.
He sat still for half an hour, and it was one of the worst half-hours hed ever spent. People came and went, looking at the paintings, talking in quiet voices, ignoring him; a gallery attendant stood in the doorway for a few minutes, hands behind his back, and then slowly moved away; and Will wrestled with the horror of what hed done, and didnt move a muscle.
"I think it does what your Cave does. Thats what I want to find out. If I can answer a question truly," said Lyra desperately, "something you know the answer to and I dont, can I try your Cave then?"
"What did he look like? The journalist, I mean?"
"Yes," said Lyra. "If I say I will, I will. I could help you, I expect."
"You wont see anything. Anyway, Im tired. Its too complicated."
Finally he noticed people moving more purposefully, and all in the same direction. They were leaving, because the attendant was telling them that the museum would close in ten minutes. Will gathered himself and left. He found his way to the High Street, where the lawyers office was, and wondered about going to see him, despite what hed said earlier. The man had sounded friendly enough....
Dr. Malone was breathless.
Then she blinked and sighed and came out of her temporary trance.
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.
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, are we into fortune-telling now? What is this thing?"
"Whats dark matter?" said Lyra. "Thats what it says on the sign, isnt it?"
"I come from another world," she said. "Its 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 theres a Jordan College, but there ent 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..."
"Clearer? Thats the clearest its ever been!"
And she rubbed her eyes again, as if she was only just waking up.
The screen faded. Dr. Malone blinked.
Dr. Malone was running her hands through her hair and blinking hard to keep her tired eyes clear.
"Its 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."
"Oh, sorry. The computer. We call it the Cave. Shadows on the walls of the Cave, you see, from Plato. Thats our archaeologist again. Hes an all-around intellectual. But hes gone off to Geneva for a job interview, and I dont suppose for a moment hell be back.... Where was I? Oh, the Cave, thats right. Once youre linked up to it, if you think, the Shadows respond. Theres no doubt about it. The Shadows flock to your thinking like birds...."
"Well, were 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 weve done instead is to set up an electromagnetic field around the detector that shuts out the things we dont want and lets through the ones we do. Then we amplify the signal and put it through a computer."
Thats revolutionary enough; its our consciousness that they respond to, you see."
"This is it. Over there," she said, pointing to a screen that was glowing an empty gray. "Thats 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."
Lyra let her take it. Dr. Malones eyes widened as she felt the weight "Dear Lord, its made of gold. Where on earth—"
"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 its 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?"
But as he made up his mind to cross the street and go in, he stopped suddenly.
"Well, youre not the only one, as you see. There was a big to-do about it at the time. I looked it all up for the journalist. It was a preliminary survey, not a proper dig. You cant do a dig till you know whether its worth spending time on it, so this group went out to look at a number of sites and make a report. Half a dozen blokes altogether. Sometimes on an expedition like this you combine forces with people from another discipline—you know, geologists or whatever—to split the cost. They look at their stuff and we lookat ours. In this case there was a physicist on the team. I think he was looking at high-level atmospheric particles. The aurora, you know, the northern lights. He had balloons with radio transmitters, apparently.
Dr. Malone shook her head, but not to say no, just out of helplessness. She spread her hands. "Very well," she said. "I think Im dreaming. I might as well carry on."
"But, you see, you cant say this sort of thing in a funding application if you want to be taken seriously. It does not make sense. It cannot exist. Its impossible, and if it isnt impossible, its irrelevant, and if it isnt either of those things, its embarrassing."
"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?"
She said, "Dark matter is what my research team is looking for. No one knows what it is. Theres more stuff out there in the universe than we can see, thats 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."
"All right, youre all hooked up," said Dr. Malone. "The rooms 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."
"What is it?" Lyra said again.
"In connection with one of the men who disappeared on that trip. It was the height of the cold war when the expedition vanished. Star Wars. Youre probably too young to remember that. The Americans and the Russians were building enormous radar installations all across the Arctic....
Dr. Malone was silent. Then she said, "All right, where do you come from?"
What would these people have to do in order to understand the language of the Shadows?
"Those pictures on the screen ..." Dr. Malone began.
"The Nuniatak dig," said the archaeologist, swinging his chair around. "Youre the second person in a month to ask me about that."
"The cave?" said Lyra.
"The funding committee decides at the end of the week.... Why?"
Will turned aside at once, casually, and looked in the window of the jewelers shop beside him. He saw the mans reflection look around, settle the knot of his tie, and go into the lawyers office. As soon as hed gone in, Will moved away, his heart thudding again. There wasnt anywhere safe. He drifted toward the university library and waited for Lyra.
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 its 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?"
"I want to try it," said Lyra.
"Please! I know what Im doing!"
"And there was another man with them. An ex-Marine, a sort of professional explorer. They were going up into some fairly wild territory, and polar bears are always a danger in the Arctic.
"What dyou want to know that for?"
"So anyway," she said, "you could make this screen so it could talk to you in words, if you wanted.
"Its Dust," said Lyra authoritatively. "Thats what it is."
Why am I telling you this? I shouldnt. Its not published, its not refereed, its not even written down. Im a little crazy this afternoon.
"Oh—youve just put on the best display Ive ever seen, thats all," said Dr. Malone. "What were you doing? What were you thinking?"
"Yes," Dr. Malone went on, "they know were here. They answer back. And here goes the crazy part: you cant 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— Wheres that quotation ..."
Anyway, what can I do for you?"
