“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 dont know. I thought—”
“Now all discoveries of this sort, because they have a bearing on the doctrines of the Church, have to be announced through the Magisterium in Geneva. And this discovery of Rusakovs was so unlikely and strange that the inspector from the Consistorial Court of Discipline suspected Rusakov of diabolic possession. He performed an exorcism in the laboratory, he interrogated Rusakov under the rules of the Inquisition, but finally they had to accept the fact that Rusakov wasnt lying or deceiving them: Dust really existed.
“And what about the Gobblers?” Lyra said.
Lyra turned around again. Her father was lying back in his chair, lazy and powerful, his eyes as fierce as his daemons. She didnt love him, she couldnt trust him, but she had to admire him, and the extravagant luxury hed assembled in this desolate wasteland, and the power of his ambition.
She twisted her lips. It was like being back at Jordan, being quizzed on something shed been half-taught. “Sort of,” she said.
“Youve left the alethiometer,” she said.
“Umm...They were thrown out. God threw them out of the garden.”
It came the moment their daemons became fixed.”
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.
“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they saw the true form of their daemons, and spoke with them.
“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 daemons took on any form they desired. But this is what happened.”
“And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
“Yes. They are terrified. And with good reason.”
“No. Of course not. Thats 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.”
Somewhere out there is the origin of all the Dust, all the death, the sin, the misery, the destructiveness in the world. Human beings cant see anything without wanting to destroy it, Lyra. Thats original sin. And Im going to destroy it. Death is going to die.”
“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 ones daemon, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
“And what happened then?”
“No, you dont. Go to the shelf beside the desk and bring me the Bible.”
“But—”
“Im interested in something quite different. I dont think the Oblation Board goes far enough. I want to go to the source of Dust itself.”
“And that was how sin came into the world,” he said, “sin and shame and death.
“Goodnight, child.”
“You do remember the story of Adam and Eve?”
“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.
He stood up, and so did his daemon, 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?
“And what were you doing?” she said. “Did you do any of that cutting?”
“Thats right. Anyway, the General Oblation Board grew out of ideas like that, and out of the Churchs obsession with original sin.”
“Go to bed,” he said. “Thorold will show you where to sleep.”
“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and your daemons shall assume their true forms, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
“It was hers. She guessed that the two things that happen at adolescence might be connected: the change in ones daemon and the fact that Dust began to settle.
“But whose idea was it to do that cutting in the first place?”
“From the other universe we can see through the Aurora.”
Lyra did so, and handed the big black book to her father.
“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 Gods cursing Adam for eating the fruit.”
“But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart. Im using the example of tossing a coin to make it clearer.
“And Im going to that world beyond the Aurora,” he said, “because I think thats 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. Youve 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.
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 Gods admittinghis 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 thats why the particles became known as Dust.”
“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, its true; theres no possible way of denying it.
“Is that why they put you here?”
“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....”
“But some years ago a Muscovite called Boris Mikhailovitch Rusakov discovered a new kind of elementary particle. Youve heard of electrons, photons, neutrinos, and the rest? Theyre called elementary particles because you cant break them down any further: theres nothing inside them but themselves. Well, this new kind of particle was elementary all right, but it was very hard to measure because it didnt react in any of the usual ways. The hardest thing for Rusakov to understand was why the new particle seemed to cluster where human beings were, as if it were attracted to us. And especially to adults. Children too, but not nearly so much until their daemons have taken a fixed form. During the years of puberty they begin to attract Dust more strongly, and it settles on them as it settles on adults.
“But they were cutting—” Lyra couldnt 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?”
“Dust is what makes the alethiometer work,” he said. “Ah...I thought it might! But what else? How did they find out about it?”
So she did. She began with her hiding in the Retiring Room, and went on to the Gobblers taking Roger, and her time with Mrs. Coulter, and everything else that had happened.
“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.
“But when the man and the woman knew their own daemons, 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:
“I dont need an alethiometer for that. Now I want to hear about your journey here, Lyra. Start from the beginning. Tell me everything.”
“You see, your mothers always been ambitious for power. At first she tried to get it in the normal way, through marriage, but that didnt work, as I think youve heard. So she had to turn to the Church. Naturally she couldnt 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.”
“Exactly. So she found out that it was possible to separate them.”
“Anyway, its 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.
“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 castrate 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 wouldnt 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 didnt have anesthetics or sterile bandages or proper nursing care. It would be gentle by comparison.”
“That left them with the problem of deciding what it was. And given the Churchs nature, there was only one thing they could have chosen. The Magisterium decided that Dust was the physical evidence for original sin. Do you know what original sin is?”
Lyra couldnt sit still. Shegot 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 theyd done to Tony Makarios and all the others. Nothing justified that.
“Course,” she said. “She wasnt supposed to eat the fruit and the serpent tempted her, and she did.”
“And they didnt see it. The energy that links body and daemon is immensely powerful. When the cut is made, all that energy dissipates in a fraction of a second. They didnt 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....”
“What is that other universe?” she said.
“It isnt!” Lyra said fiercely. “It isnt!”
“The General Oblation Board...Your mothers gang. Clever of her to spot the chance of setting up her own power base, but shes a clever woman, as I dare say youve 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.
“But...” Lyra struggled to find the words she wanted: “but it ent true, is it?
“The Cassington Scholarship is traditionally given to a freethinker; itshis function to challenge the faith of the Scholars. Naturally hed 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 couldnt be imagined without it.
“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 dont know before it lands which way its 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.
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 dont exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which they did happen.
“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....”
Lord Asriels daemon twitched her ears, and he laid his hand on her beautiful head.
“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.”
He looked at her as if trying to guess whether she would understand what he was about to say. He had never looked at her seriously before, she thought; until now he had always been like an adult indulging a child in a pretty trick. But he seemed to think she was ready.
“Ah, yes; I dont actually need that now,” he said. “It would be no use to me without the books anyway. Dyou know, I think the Master of Jordan was giving it to you. Did he actually ask you to bring it to me?”
It was a long tale, and when she finished it she said, “So theres one thing I want to know, and I reckon Ive got the right to know it, like I had the right to know who I really was. And if you didnt tell me that, youve got to tell me this, in recompense. So: whats Dust? And whys everyone so afraid of it?”
He opened the Bible again and pointed it out to Lyra. She read:
He turned to go.
“And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
“The source? Wheres it come from, then?”
“In one way, the Church has always been aware of it. Theyve been preaching about Dust for centuries, only they didnt call it by that name.
“Well, I dont want it. Its yours, Lyra.”
Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasnt really an Adam and Eve? The Cassington Scholar told me it was just a kind of fairy tale.”
Perhaps if the daemon were separated from the body, we might never be subject to Dust—to original sin. The question was whether it was possible to separate daemon and body without killing the person. But shes traveled in many places, and seen all kinds of things. Shes 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....”
“There was something else that happened when they made the cut,” he went on.
“Its a person without their daemon!”
He closed the book.
He turned to Chapter Three of Genesis, and read:
