Chapter Nineteen Arctic Healing #3
She tried looking at it, and found nothing to see except a slight thickening of the shadows. There was a bulkhead light further along the deck, but here in this corner by the lifeboats the only light came from the surging phosphorescence of the waves.
The presence moved, but very slightly, and Lyra heard a voice that might have spoken inside her own skull.
“We have not spoken before,” it said. “But I know who you are. An angel called Xaphania told me about you.”
Lyra remembered with a shiver of fear: Xaphania was the angel who told her and Will that they could not live in the same world, and must separate, and that the only form of travel between worlds must take place in the imagination.
The imagination—
“Xaphania?” Lyra said. “You’ve really spoken to Xaphania?”
“Yes.”
“She told me when we last met that there was to be no traveling between worlds. Did you know that?”
“Of course.”
“And she said that we must close every opening between the worlds.”
“That is the truth.”
“But she said that we’d be able to travel in the imagination. What did she mean by the imagination?”
“You understood her then. Now you are grown up, and you’ve forgotten?”
The voice was perfectly clear inside her head, like those of the angels she’d spoken to at other times. What she couldn’t tell was whether it could be heard outside as well.
“I didn’t understand, and neither did the boy who was with me,” she said. “I want to know now more than ever: What is the imagination?”
“The power of making things up. Inventing things. Surely you know that?” said the voice.
“Am I imagining your voice now? Imagining what you’re saying to me?”
“No. I’m truly saying it, and you’re truly hearing it.”
“I’m hearing it, but I don’t believe it. And it wasn’t what Xaphania said before.”
“In telling things to children, we have to sweeten the truth. You wouldn’t believe the truth when you were young, because you didn’t want to, and you would have argued and demanded a truth that you liked instead of one you found unpalatable.”
“I was a child. I couldn’t argue with a being like her.”
“You argued with all the authorities of your world. You argued with every law you had ever known. You argued with everyone who told you that Dust was abominable, and had to be feared and rejected. Now you say you couldn’t argue with one angel?”
“I couldn’t argue then. But I can argue now. And something else: back then, she said the imagination wasn’t just making things up—it was a form of seeing. Was that true?”
“As I say, we need to tell children many things to console them. Human parents do that, and it’s kind to do so. There are times we need consolation more than accuracy.”
“So she told me a lie?”
“She consoled you.”
“All right, then,” Lyra said bitterly, “I’m grateful for that consolation. But I’m a grown woman now, and it’s about time I heard the truth. Because I know that whatever the imagination is, it isn’t just inventing things. Making things up and pretending they’re real is not enough.”
“It is enough for the great poets. For the storytellers and the artists of every kind. They take things as they are, things in the world, and play with them and change them about and make something new. Is that an activity to condemn as trivial?”
“That’s what you think poets and storytellers do?”
“Why, yes. What else?”
And Lyra didn’t know. She knew so little, herself; surely Pan was thinking of something more than that when he went in search of the great thing she had lost.
“But that’s what I did when I told lies,” she said. “I used to be a famous liar. I took things that were partly true and I made up other things out of them. But they were lies. I knew they weren’t true as I told them. You can’t mean that the imagination is the same thing as telling lies?”
“Where is the difference?”
“The difference…” Lyra began, and then thought carefully before going on: “There is no difference between lies and what you said the imagination was. Taking real things and changing them a bit. That’s exactly what liars do.
That’s what I used to do, all the time. I can still do that, if I want to.
I’m good at it. Pantalaimon knows that. Why would he go in search of something I still had? ”
“Because he wants more. And in following him, you’re doing the same. You want more than there is to have.”
“I just want to know the truth.”
“And I’ve told you the truth.”
Lyra could barely speak. There was a turmoil in her heart at least the equal of the storm on the water, and she was afraid of her own anger even more than she was afraid of the seasickness. She sat still, squeezing her painful left hand to distract herself.
Finally she said, trembling, “I think you’re wrong.”
“Why?”
“I think you’re wrong, because I’ve learned things in the past ten years that I didn’t know when I spoke to Xaphania on that beach in another world half my life ago.
I thought then that angels must speak the truth, because they know the truth and they wouldn’t lie.
Well, I knew already that people can lie even if they know the truth, because that’s what I did.
Lyra the liar. That’s what they called me in the world of the dead.
I knew that. But I’ve learned something else too: older people, even people as old as angels, don’t know everything.
They might give the impression of great wisdom, immense knowledge, the experience of thousands upon thousands of lifetimes, but they can still be wrong.
There are still things they don’t know. They can speak with great confidence and still be wrong.
They can be good and benevolent and kindly and, yes, wise too, but they can still get things wrong.
There are things I know that you don’t—yes, there are.
And when you talk like that about the thing my daemon has risked his life—and mine—to go and find, when you describe something so important and precious in terms of making things up and pretending, I know you’ve got it wrong. ”
The angel said nothing. The thickened cluster of shadows that was all Lyra could see of her didn’t move. If she was angry, or contemptuous, she gave no sign.
Lyra thought: Am I talking to myself?
“I’m not sure if you can hear me,” she said, “so I’ll say something else, just in case you can.
Xaphania told me and Will that we had to stay in our own worlds.
That there should be no contact with other ones.
She said every time the subtle knife cut through from one world to another, it left a gap that Specters could come out of.
Again, we believed her then. But maybe that was something else she thought was true, except that it wasn’t.
Or something she just said to—what was the word? —console us.”
Nothing but silence from the shadows.
“Because, you see, there’s something I’ve been thinking about.
The rose oil that’s one of the ways people can see Dust—it comes from the desert of Karamakan, from a building there that the guards let no one enter.
Well, I think there’s one of those openings there.
Will and I used to call them windows. Between our world and the rose world, I mean.
I’m going to go there and see if that’s true.
Because if it is, and if the rose oil helps people to understand the truth about things, then I want to keep it open.
I want to make sure other openings like that are protected.
I want to make new ones. Can you hear what I’m saying? ”
She felt a kind of shiver, as if she’d just said something she didn’t know, until then, that she believed.
“Yes, and it causes me sorrow,” the shadows whispered.
“Because of the Specters?”
“Because of a thousand things you know nothing about.”
“But in some ways I do know more than you.”
“You don’t know, you dream—”
“When you say ‘dream,’ tell me what you think that means. Truthfully.”
“A dream is your imagination working. A thing of fantasy. Your dreams are empty, gossamer, fragile, transitory. You have them only to forget them. Wishes, impossible things, horses that fly, clocks that walk about, trees that speak—nothing but fragments of cobweb. Trivial, childish, unimportant. You dream, and I see truly. That’s the difference. ”
“That’s something else you’ve got wrong,” Lyra said.
“What’s that?” The angel’s tone was interested, not brusque.
“You think that what matters in a dream is the story, the information, the content, you could say, and that it’s meaningless, because it makes no sense and fades and disappears.
Of course it does, because the information is not what’s important.
What matters most in a dream is the emotion that comes with it.
Dreams are soaked with emotion, with fear, or longing, or love, or excitement, or sadness.
They come to give us intense feeling, not information, and it lasts a very long time, long after the information, or the story, is blown away like dry leaves.
I know that some angels used to be human beings. Were you ever human?”
“No.”
“Do angels dream?”
“No.”
“Do angels make art? Do you write poetry or compose music or paint pictures?”
“No.”
“Then what do you know about dreams? About the imagination?”
“Let me ask you in return: Do you write poetry or compose music or paint pictures?”
“I tell stories.”
“By stories, you mean…”
“All right, lies, yes. I used to tell lies, till I realized how much other people were hurt when they found I wasn’t telling the truth.
But I shaped them like stories. I timed the telling so that it satisfied something, some taste or other, some aesthetic sense, some sort of need.
I prepared the way for a turn in the story, so that it seemed inevitable when it came even though you didn’t anticipate it.
I gave the characters enough depth to seem real while they were in front of you, and for a while afterwards.
I put in just the right amount of detail so the person listening could see what I was describing in their mind’s eye without being overwhelmed by things that didn’t matter.
I was making art, you see, a cheap and shoddy sort, maybe, for a purpose that might be banal or underhand or greedy, but it was art.
I was shaping things. Making patterns. I was just like someone thousands of years ago sitting under a tree carving crisscross lines on a stick with a sharp bit of flint because they enjoyed looking at it.
Or another one cutting holes in a bone and blowing through it and making different notes because they enjoyed hearing it.
Or beating a hollow log for people to dance to.
Rhythms and patterns and…and resemblances.
And things that led from them, like metaphors. Angels were never children, were they?”
“No.”
“You were never children, you never dream, and you don’t make art…Then I know some things you don’t. I understand them from the inside.”
Lyra was aware with all her senses of the lurch and surge and creak of the sea and the ship, the steady thud of the engines below and the howl of the winds through the rigging above, the all-pervasive ship-smell of fuel oil and stale cooking, but she heard not a word from the angel; and when she sheltered her eyes from the rain and peered closely into the shadows beside her on the bench, there was nothing there to see. The angel had gone.
And a little later, as she finally fell asleep in her bunk, the ferry captain made a public announcement: he was turning the ship around, because conditions were worsening and it was not safe to continue. They were returning to Baku.