Chapter Twenty-Six The Hard Problem #2
Delamare couldn’t see the symbols on the dial; all he could see was Bonneville staring down, his hands turning one of the wheels forwards, backwards, forwards again.
The boy was breathing faster. Suddenly his chest tightened and he strained as if to vomit, only to resist it and sit still.
His face was covered in a sheen of sweat, and the pallor beneath was sickly white.
Bonneville continued his turning and gazing, touching and withdrawing, adjusting and peering, and then a convulsion shook his body and he flung himself away from the desk and stumbled to the washbasin. Delamare winced as the horrible sounds of retching and vomiting filled the air.
But Bonneville had little in his stomach.
He spat, retched again and again, and then sank to the floor weeping.
Delamare watched; he genuinely didn’t know what to do.
After a few moments the boy hauled himself up and turned on the tap to clean the basin and fill his mouth.
He rinsed it out and spat several times, and then turned off the tap and went back to his chair, trembling, holding on to the wall to steady himself.
“Well?” said Delamare.
“She’s on a cliff overlooking the sea, a lake, something. Maybe the Caspian Sea. Not far from here anyway.”
His voice was rough, as if the stomach acid had damaged his vocal cords. He looked around for something.
“What do you want?” said Delamare.
“Glass of water.”
Ignoring the whisper from his owl daemon, Delamare found a glass on a shelf near the basin and filled it. As he took it to Bonneville, he admitted, silently, that the boy had won again: getting the President to wait on him was another reminder of who had the power.
Bonneville sipped and lay back in the chair, his eyes closed.
“What else did you see?” said Delamare, resuming his own seat.
“A lighthouse. White with red bands. A small wooden jetty. A man—there is a man with her.”
“Who is he?”
“Never seen him before.”
“Is the girl’s daemon with her?”
“Couldn’t see. This is not a telescope, or some kind of photo-film. I can only see what I’m able to force my body to perceive. As you realize, it costs me a great deal.”
“Why do you put yourself through that?” Delamare’s tone was sympathetic.
“Because you asked me to.”
“This time, yes. But why did you try that in the first place?”
“Because I’m not Lacroix, or any of the other fakes and cowards.
They wouldn’t dare. They’ve tried the new method, some of them, and they’ve all given up.
It’s too hard for them. They labor over the old books, looking this up, making a note, putting a slip of paper in the place, looking something else up, making a note—getting nowhere because they haven’t got the courage to suffer. ”
He groaned involuntarily and clutched his mouth, and ran to the basin to vomit again.
Delamare heard a sort of stifled cry, and looked across to see a thick stream of blood falling from the boy’s mouth.
He uttered a gasp of alarm and hastened to Bonneville’s side, but the boy held out a hand to stop him, and Delamare stood still in the middle of the room.
“Olivier? Are you hurt? What’s happening?”
Bonneville spat out more blood, rinsed his mouth from the tap, wiped his sleeve across his face. His hawk daemon sat calmly on the windowsill nearby, and Delamare realized with a slight shock that she was watching him, not Bonneville, and that she had been for some time.
“I just need to lie down,” said Bonneville, and his voice was even hoarser and more strained.
“I’m going to call for a doctor.”
“No, no, I don’t need a doctor. This is what always happens. They know nothing about what I have to do, and with the language difficulty it would take all night.”
“It’s already morning. You’re not moving from here till you’ve recovered.”
“Here? This office?”
“The building. I’ll make sure you have somewhere comfortable to lie down. Meanwhile, I’ll take this.”
He picked up the alethiometer from the desk before Bonneville could reach it, and then opened the door and called for the brigadier.
The boy sank into the chair and laid his head on the desk. The fake-blood capsule was safely rinsed away, but he’d seen that that bitch had somehow destroyed his alethiometer. She would pay, she would suffer, she would know more pain than she could ever dream of.
He let himself be led away to a couch, and closed his eyes.
—
Pan couldn’t talk to Tilda Vasara as he clung to the cloud-pine she was holding. It took all his concentration and strength to hold on to the flimsy branch, which hadn’t seemed very flimsy on the ground; and it was bitingly cold.
All he could do as they skimmed through the air above the Caspian Sea was ask himself questions, and try to answer them honestly.
Why was he doing this? Impulse. And fear; he was afraid to see Lyra face to face.
He was beginning to feel that it had been cruel to leave her in the way he did, and she might not find it easy to forgive him.
What was he hoping to do at Tashbulak? Look around, ask questions, find things out.
Why Tashbulak, anyway, and not the red building itself?
Fear, again. He was afraid that if he entered the red building he might not be able to leave.
He hadn’t shared Lyra’s realization that it might contain a window into another world; all he could think of was a garden of roses, fiercely guarded, with distilleries and bottling plants and…
whatever else they needed to sell the oil.
Workers. Transport facilities…He noticed his own use of a vacuous word like “facilities” with scorn.
And that bitter, cruel jibe about her imagination?
But he was right. Perhaps he was wrong to imply that it was her fault, but something had vanished, and they both knew it.
And he would give his life to get it back for her—except that of course it would be her life too.
Perhaps he should have talked to her and they might have been able to go and search for it together.
Or perhaps he should have been her imagination.
But no: it wasn’t just something you could bolt on like a spare part.
It was something far more deeply interfused…
He knew all the poetry that Lyra did, of course, and loved it just as much, and that phrase came to him unbidden and at first unrecognized, from a time when she’d been reading in a whisper and he’d been lying with his head against hers.
It was like them: deeply interfused. Something had left her, and it had left him.
He had just reached that conclusion when he sensed a change in their movement. Tilda Vasara was gliding downwards. It was still night, but Pan could feel a freshness in the atmosphere, and looking down he could see a shoreline ahead of them. He adjusted his position, feeling stiff and painful.
“I’m going to land,” Tilda Vasara called. “I’m tired and I want to sleep. Safer during the day anyway.”
“Where are we?” Pan called back.
“The eastern side of the sea. That’s all I know.”
She landed lightly in a meadow where three horses were dozing.
One of them raised its head, looked at Tilda briefly, and then went back to sleep.
The others didn’t stir. Tilda’s daemon, the tern, skimmed low over the grass before settling on a wooden fence under some small trees.
He said something quietly, and Tilda replied, but Pan was nearly asleep, curled up under a tamarisk shrub, and he heard no more.
—
The harsh rattle of an air-cooled engine broke into Dilyara’s sleep.
She hadn’t heard that sound for months, and she woke with a start and the thudding of her anxious blood.
She was lying next to Strauss, but chastely, for warmth, and now she sat up, careful not to disturb him, and listened keenly.
The truck, or whatever it was, was moving around the side of the station and into the space next to the loading bay.
That was where the road took them; everything that supplied the station had to go that way.
She sat still, wondering whether to wake Strauss and warn him, or let him sleep. A little snore told her that he was probably better left unconscious.
She pulled the rug over him and stood up, gathering a blanket around herself.
On bare cold feet she moved out of the little storeroom where they slept and along the corridor that led to the loading bay.
The engine had stopped, and she could hear voices now too.
Two men, or possibly three, speaking a language she didn’t know, but she recognized the tone of confidence and authority.
They would claim they had a right to be here.
They would deal with her easily, possibly violently, but certainly more like the clean wind of God than like the botanists and others who had worked here peacefully.
The outer door of the loading bay, a rolling metal shutter closed with a padlock, was rattling as they shook it from outside.
More voices. There was a side door, and they tried the handle. But it was locked as well.
A voice asked a question, and a deeper one replied dismissively.
Footsteps moved along the side of the building, without urgency, and then the deep voice called something from further off, and a third voice answered.
Dilyara thought she could hear a word or two in Chinese, but nothing she understood.
She waited. She wondered if Chen had heard the truck from his comfortable bed in the village; he might be concerned about his camels, or eager to meet a buyer for them; but nothing else happened for five minutes or so, while she got colder and colder and the voices conversed indifferently.
Footsteps returning; an order from the deep voice; the engine wheezing and coughing as it turned over and caught; and after the rapidly diminishing rattle of the truck, silence lay over the station again.