Chapter Two The Infirmary
Two
The Infirmary
Some time before Lyra arrived at the City of the Moon, the director of Oakley Street had had a visitor. The organization had been officially disbanded, and Glenys Godwin had been ordered to retire and surrender all control of the records, files, offices, property, everything, to the Home Office.
She’d done nothing of the sort. She was determined to keep as much as she could out of the hands of the faction now running the government, and to continue the fight and uphold the principles she’d sworn to support when she joined Oakley Street as a young woman forty years before.
Since their offices had been commandeered, she and her senior team were working temporarily from a large and dingy flat near Battersea Park.
No one, she thought, knew where they were; so it was a shock when the doorbell rang in the late morning and her secretary came in to say that an elderly man would like to see her. He’d given his name as Makepeace.
“Did he say anything more than that?”
“No, ma’am. But he said he’d specifically come to see you.”
“Me by name? Not just the director, or the person in charge?”
“He gave your full name.”
“What does he look like, David?”
“Seventies. Quite vigorous, though, I should think. Dusty black suit, rather shabby, but more like a retired craftsman than a vagrant, for example. His daemon’s a cat.”
“Well, I’m curious. Show him in, but stand by next door, won’t you?”
She stayed at her desk as the visitor came in. The secretary’s summary was accurate, but he hadn’t mentioned the air of intellectual force expressed by the man’s clear eyes and commanding expression, nor the faint smell of wood smoke. The man was carrying a small battered attaché case.
“Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. Godwin,” he said. His voice was educated, his tone aristocratic. “I won’t take up much of your time.”
“Do sit down, Mr. Makepeace. First, how do you know my name? Second, how did you know how to find me?”
“I’ve been aware of Oakley Street for a long time. I knew Tom Nugent very well, and I agreed with the principles he worked for. I knew your name because he told me before he died that you would succeed him, and I knew how to find you because I’ve been here before, when it was used as a safe house.”
“But—”
“All you need to know is what I’m going to tell you about these things.”
He opened the attaché case and took out a brown-paper parcel about the size of a large man’s fist. He opened it to reveal two flat stones, greenish-black in color, each with one side shinier and flatter than the other.
“What are those?” said Godwin, picking one of them up and feeling its weight.
“If you have one of these, you can communicate instantaneously with the other, no matter how far they are apart. They work by a process of quantum entanglement, but I haven’t got time to tell you how.
You’ll have to discover how to use them yourself.
They will give you an immediate and powerful advantage over your enemies. Our enemies.”
“Where do they come from?”
“From another world.”
He spoke with the same sober dignity as before, his eyes steady and clear, his hands folded calmly in his lap; but…another world?
“I see,” she said. “And how did they come into your possession?”
“Very simply. I saw them in a junk shop window, and recognized them, and bought them. In the world they come from they’re known as resonating lodestones.”
“And this other world…”
“You’ll remember the Barnard-Stokes hypothesis.”
“I thought the point of that was that each world is completely unreachable from any other.”
“That was a part of the mathematics put in quite late to deceive the authorities into thinking that the many-worlds idea could have no practical application, so it could be examined theoretically without falling into heresy.”
“So if these things have come through, somehow, from their own world, there might be ways for people to do so as well?”
“Yes, but they’re difficult and dangerous. Human travel is virtually impossible. But objects do find their way sometimes out of one world and into another. Chance, accident, forgetfulness.”
“Where had you seen things like this before? You said you recognized them.”
“I recognized that they hadn’t come from this world.
Once you’ve learned how to see that, it’s unmistakable.
It’s like training your senses, the way a piano tuner learns to recognize harmonies and intervals.
I had no idea what they were used for until I met a traveler who had seen them and spoken to the strange people who used them.
I’ve told no one but you, but the time has come for them to be used again. ”
All kinds of possibilities flickered across her mind like the figures in a phantasmagoria. He sat calm and steady, returning her gaze.
“What do you do, Mr. Makepeace?”
“I used to work at what we once called experimental theology. That term seems to be going out of favor these days, so I like to let it be known that I am an alchemist.” Something changed in his expression.
A little glint, a shimmer of complicity, and she knew they understood each other.
He closed his briefcase. “Time is pressing, Mrs. Godwin. But I would like a receipt for these things.”
“My secretary will make one out.” She pressed a button and spoke briefly to him, before turning back to Makepeace. “May I know where you live?”
“In Oxford, in the district they call Jericho. Juxon Street, to be precise.”
The door opened, and her secretary came in with two copies of a typed receipt, which she and Makepeace both signed.
He took his copy and stood up. They shook hands, and she came to the door with him.
“Thank you for bringing me these,” she said. “And you think I can discover how to use them?”
“I do. And if whoever you’re communicating with can find out anything at all about the alkahest, they would be doing something very valuable.”
“The alkahest? What’s that?”
“A term from alchemy. Mrs. Godwin, your political masters will quite soon find out this address. I think it would be wise to move before they do.”
“I’ve always liked the sound of Hemel Hempstead,” she said. “Such a romantic name.”
Another little flicker: he understood. He smiled, and nodded, and left.
“Well, David,” said Glenys Godwin to the secretary. “Now we’ve got some work to do.”
—
Marcel Delamare, President of the High Council of the Magisterium, didn’t often leave the building in Geneva, known as La Maison Juste, that held his office.
His comfortable apartment in a nearby building overlooking the lake, the cathedral, an occasional visit to a restaurant or a concert, and a walk along the lakeshore for his health; the world he moved in was quiet and well-ordered.
He hadn’t been to the mountains since he was a very young man, when he’d thought that an enthusiasm for climbing would be a useful part of a well-rounded reputation.
So it had been at least twenty-five years since he had trodden the snowy paths above Les Diablerets, and he had never taken the route that led to the phenomenon he was now examining.
In fact, said his guide, hardly anyone ever had.
If the third man present was familiar with it, he didn’t say; he said very little.
Colonel Schreiber was completely at home in the mountains, and like other senior officers under the command of what used to be known as the Consistorial Court of Discipline, he was used to keeping quiet.
His stocky form and his Franz Joseph beard and mustache and bare chin were familiar to all those under his command.
The thing they were looking at stood among densely growing pine trees in a steep valley, and Delamare had never seen anything like it. It looked as if someone had cut a hole in the air.
It was hard to see, and in the pale afternoon light it might easily have been missed by anyone who wasn’t looking for it, because the land on the other side—through the hole, so to speak—was very similar to everything around it on this side: pine trees, a rocky slope under snow.
It was so much the same that anyone walking there might have missed it, not least because all their attention would have been focused on keeping their footing on the steep rocky slope under the snow.
“Do they all look like this, Beamish?” he said to the guide.
Hugo Beamish was a lean, grizzled, sunburned man in his forties. “Yes, they do,” he said. “All roughly this size, all in isolated places, not easy to get to, not easy to see.”
Delamare found a firmer footing and leaned closer.
The edge of the hole in the air was clearly visible when he was close, but not so easy from a little way back.
The opening was big enough for an adult man or woman to step through, and irregular in shape: no straight edges or smooth curves, more like something cut freehand and perhaps in a hurry.
“What happens when—Colonel, I wonder if you would oblige—could you go behind it, so to speak, from the side…” said Delamare, moving carefully back a step or two.
Colonel Schreiber did as he was asked. Balancing lightly on the snow-covered rocks, he stepped up to the opening from the side and moved behind it.
He vanished at once. His daemon, a porcupine, hadn’t gone with him, and was intensely agitated: she whimpered and rattled her quills, scuttling back and forth in front of the opening.
Delamare took a deep breath. The guide had seen this thing before, and leaned on his stick and just watched.
“Colonel? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, I can hear you, but I can’t see you. Either of you.”
“Would you come back, please?”
Schreiber appeared as if he’d just stepped out from behind a building, though there was nothing to see but the steep rocky slope, the close-growing snow-covered trees.
“Stand where I am, if you please,” Delamare said, “and watch as I go through.”