Chapter Eighteen Noli Me Tangere
Eighteen
Noli Me Tangere
Olivier Bonneville, nursing his injured daemon and his badly injured pride, was still captive in the nuncio’s house in Aleppo.
Or so he thought: in fact, the nuncio would have been delighted if the wretched boy cleared off altogether.
But it suited Bonneville to have a good reason not to risk liberty for a while, so he stayed in his comfortable room and ate his three meals a day and spent most of his time with the alethiometer.
What he learned was intriguing in many ways.
Firstly, the girl had left Aleppo and was traveling eastwards.
But something was confusing the new method, or else it was proving itself unable to deal with perspective in more than three dimensions, or else he was simply incapable of reading it just then; but the last possibility was so absurd that he put it out of his mind, and remembered the copy of Spiridion Trepka’s Alethiometrica Explicata, which he’d stolen from the library of the Priory of St. Jerome before leaving Geneva.
With its help he was able to read the instrument without feeling sick.
Trepka was limited and shallow but accurate as far as he went, and although Bonneville’s technique was a little rusty, he was able to follow Lyra’s journey with Trepka’s aid more comfortably than he could with the new method.
Perhaps his sense of balance had been disturbed when the girl kicked him, or perhaps his daemon’s broken wing had a psychological component; yes, that was it.
The new method would come into its own when her wing had healed.
In the meantime, he knew where Lyra was, though there was something confusing… Never mind for now.
Secondly, he turned his attention to Geneva and the Magisterium.
He’d followed the politics of the new Supreme Council as much as the new method had let him, and he was glad to have a chance to explore it more fully without having to vomit.
Delamare was gathering power to himself with the utmost skill and delicacy; hardly anyone outside the Council had been aware of the way the authority of the President had softly and silently grown, and the Council was so pleased with the way things were now done, the efficiency, the smooth and effortless inevitability, that every member was behind him.
It helped that he was rewarding each of them tactfully: a new oratory here, funds for a period of study leave in a Mediterranean resort there, silent understanding for a family embarrassment somewhere else.
Bonneville couldn’t perceive all the details, but he understood very clearly how things were developing.
It was galling in a way: the circumstances he could see prevailing in Geneva were exactly the sort of setting in which he and his particular talents could have prospered brilliantly.
Once he had got the measure of the different personalities who made up the Council, Bonneville put the old Alethiometrica Explicata away and set to with the new method.
Tentatively, just a little at a time, dipping a toe, withdrawing the moment his perception began to waver and disturb his balance, he looked at one after another of the individuals under Delamare’s leadership.
One or two he had met, a handful more he knew by name, but some were new to him altogether.
It seemed that they intended to meet monthly at La Maison Juste, that there were twenty-four of them, and that those who lived and worked abroad and couldn’t attend every month could appoint deputies to represent them, though the deputies did not have voting rights.
Bonneville could follow the intricacies of debate only a little way before the new method failed, and detail was beyond Trepka’s reach.
Something was blocking him, and he couldn’t discover what it was.
It can only be a matter of bodily well-being, he told himself.
Mentally he was at his peak; he was conscious of a surpassing clarity of thought.
But the kick to the kidneys…and his daemon’s broken wing…
They took their toll, these wounds of war.
—
If he had persisted with the new method he might have found out, but he simply didn’t have the physical strength.
So he didn’t see what lay behind the blockage in his perception.
It was the simple fact that each of the members of the Council had been advised by Marcel Delamare (privately, and confidentially, and in the most kindly way) that it would be better for the Magisterium, and especially for themselves, if they did not speak to one another about Council matters outside minuted Council meetings.
The implication was that they of course enjoyed the President’s entire confidence, but that other members might not.
They could by all means communicate with one another in writing, but it would be better if letters went through the President’s office first, so that he could advise on matters of policy or clarify misunderstandings.
It was all new, this Council business, so no one could object on the grounds that they’d never had to behave like that before.
Obviously the President knew best. And those members who lived some way from Geneva didn’t know one another well in any case, and would have been unlikely to meet in a casual way, or by chance; so no one found anything wrong with the arrangement.
And there were no schisms, no little cracks of variance for serious dispute to take root in. At first.
But some Council members did live in or near Geneva, and some of them (in a casual way, or by chance) did sometimes find themselves in one another’s company.
And inevitably, people being what they are, they would talk about the Council, or the President, or the rules he had imposed, or the rumors of war, or anything else that occupied their attention; and it was natural too that some of them would find themselves chafing under the rule against such conversations.
So it was, one evening in the Retiring Chamber of the College of Bishops, that three men and two women found themselves in a casual way, or by chance, together after a fine dinner.
They had come there to discuss in a perfectly lawful way something completely unrelated to the business of the Supreme Council, and since that other business had been concluded successfully some hours before, and since all five were Council members, and since the other guests (who weren’t) had left, it was not surprising that conversation should turn to the way the new Council was working.
They all knew one another well. It might be said that they were old friends.
There was nothing, except the President’s warning, to stop them speaking their minds in the company of people they trusted and agreed with about so much.
Besides, the food had been excellent and the wine generously poured.
The fire was burning brightly; smokeleaf was being enjoyed; the armchairs were comfortable; daemons were lolling on laps, or knees, or the cushioned backs of chairs.
“I’m very glad,” said their host, the Dean of the College of Bishops, a thin, intense, and zealous man, “to have this chance to talk, in private as it were. In view of what the President is about to announce, it would be a dereliction of our duty not to discuss the matter—”
“What is he about to announce?” said Karl von Landsberg. He was a senior officer of the Court of Common Order, large, red-bearded, and soldierly.
“That’s very much the point, Karl. We should have been told, and we haven’t.”
“Is it Council business, though?” said Mariette Seidel, a professor of philology from Lausanne.
“Do you mean this war declaration?” said Julius Morschach. He was a banker, rich beyond anyone’s ability to imagine, plump and sleek and genial.
“Yes, I do,” said the Dean.
“I’m afraid this is completely new to me,” said the fifth member of the group, Georges Parmentier, who had said very little throughout the evening.
He was a parish priest from a small town near the eastern end of the lake, who had a reputation for simple piety that was not wholly undeserved. “War, you say?”
“Our President,” said the Dean, “is about to announce the start of a ‘holy campaign’ ”—the quotation marks were audible—“to capture and destroy something, somewhere, which he will claim is a source of inspiration and an object of reverence to the enemies of the Authority.”
“A what? A holy campaign? What does that mean?” said Von Landsberg.
“A war,” said the banker Morschach. “I have seen an outline of what he plans to say.”
“But how—”
“Where did you—”
“What on earth—”
“A war?”
“Haven’t you noticed how he’s been scuttling from capital to capital in the past few weeks for talks with governments all over Europe, and beyond?”
“Well, his travels here and there have been announced,” said Professor Seidel, “but the announcements have been very bland—almost empty of content, in fact. I had been wondering…”
“Julius, tell us about this announcement,” said Von Landsberg. “You say you’ve seen an outline, was it, of what he’s going to say. How did you get hold of that?”
“I’d rather not say for the moment. But you can take it that it’s genuine.
He’s going to say that in the name of the Authority and of the entire body of the faithful, it is time to put an end to a source of evil that is corrupting the minds and hearts of countless numbers of people, from innocent children to men and women in positions of power and influence. It must be captured and destroyed.”
“ ‘It’? What is ‘it’?” said the professor.
“Drugs, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Von Landsberg confidently. “Opium, or worse.”
“The source of ‘it,’ whatever it is,” said the Dean, “is concealed in the heart of a desert in Central Asia. One of the most empty and barren wastelands you can imagine. The President has secret information about it. But of course he hasn’t told the Council.”