Chapter Thirty-One Merchant People
Thirty-One
Merchant People
Cariad led Pan into the station at a point where a wall had fallen.
Dilyara had begun to clear it, but much of the masonry was too heavy for her to move.
The two daemons climbed lightly over the twisted steel beams, the crumbling plaster, the broken glass, and Pan followed her down a swept and tidied corridor until they came to a door open on a lighted room.
“We’ll wait here,” Cariad whispered. “Just listen and see if Brynmor’s in there. Or Dilyara. She looks after the place. Brynmor trusts her.”
They crouched next to the wall beside the door.
People were talking in the room, not urgently, nor in a carefree, relaxed way like friends after a good dinner, but with a businesslike seriousness that was nevertheless informal.
Pan could tell that, even though he didn’t recognize the language they were speaking.
But suddenly they switched and continued in English: three men’s voices and two women’s.
“The lake is the biggest obstacle,” said a young man.
“Lop Nor? No,” said a woman. “Look at what’s happening at the Aral Sea. A simple matter of drainage will remove it altogether. And think of the Suez Canal. How they built that.”
“I don’t see the similarity. For one thing—”
“Getting the supply chain for fuel and so forth in place first,” said another man. “Is that what you mean, Petra?”
“Exactly.”
“But you can’t plan any infrastructure if the ground itself shifts about.”
“I think that’s largely mythical, that moving business,” said a younger woman.
“Even so, we’d need to stabilize the soil—”
“Which we can do. More important to my mind is the need for refueling stations on the main link.”
Pan turned to Cariad. “Are these people…? Where do they come from?” he whispered.
“Sinkiang, maybe…Different places.”
“Do they come from the red building?”
But she was moving away. She stalked slowly past the open door, stopping to look in before moving on.
No one seemed to notice her, so Pan stopped there as well, and saw the three men—in their twenties or thirties—and one older woman, and a young woman seemingly about Lyra’s age, sitting casually around or leaning against the counter where a coffee machine was steaming.
All their attention was focused on one another, and none on the open door.
He could see their daemons, small and unobtrusive, perching or sitting silently.
He turned to Cariad, but she had vanished. He cursed himself, and moved on past the door. There was something odd about those daemons, and he wanted very much to ask her about it. They looked asleep, or drugged.
He moved very carefully back into the open doorway. No one looked at him. It was as if he was invisible.
“…But thinking more boldly,” said one of the men, “I know our concern should be with the Great Road project, but there’s no reason why a canal shouldn’t solve a lot of the major problems. I mean, there’s no shortage of water running off the mountains before it all soaks into the sand.”
“If it was all directed—” said the young woman.
The other woman said something in Arabic. The conversation continued in that language, and Pan edged further into the room. One of the men moved his head a little to look at him, and Pan froze; but then the man turned back to the conversation and took no more notice.
This room was a sort of small common room or recreation area, a space where people would go to drink coffee or eat sandwiches or play cards during a break.
It was untidy, but clean enough: perhaps it was one of the spaces Dilyara looked after.
He noticed an anbaric clock fixed to the wall, and others; five altogether, showing the time in different places.
He guessed that here in Tashbulak it was perhaps nine or ten in the evening, an odd time for people to take a break from work, unless they were working to the time in—he calculated roughly—Western Europe, as one of the clocks showed.
Pan looked at the daemons of the people speaking.
A sparrow, a small dog, a wren, a lizard, and a small rodent of some sort, perhaps a mouse.
They perched or lay apparently asleep. Their people never spoke to them, and the daemons never offered a comment or asked a question: it was quite unlike any such gathering Pan had ever seen.
Normally he’d expect the daemons to be awake, interested, responsive, to be included in the talk and the interactions.
That’s what things were like. That happened everywhere and always.
Except—and he remembered it with a sickening lurch—at the hideous place at Bolvangar, in the high Arctic, where he and Lyra had made their way in order to rescue her friend Roger, half a lifetime ago.
The nurses there who looked after the stolen children had daemons who behaved not like the people they were part of but like little trotting mechanical dogs or dolls, or pets.
He and Lyra had only just escaped being separated under the silver guillotine, which cut children away from their daemons: it had been almost the worst moment of their lives.
The nurses, they thought, must have undergone the same sort of operation for their daemons to be so compliant, so much less real than they should be.
Had these people been separated by force like those at Bolvangar?
But that wren was looking at him with what might have been a faint curiosity, and that dog, at the feet of the young man by the counter, had cocked his ear when Pan came in, though he didn’t open his eye.
They were taking notice of the people, though unobtrusively, or even surreptitiously.
It was just that the people didn’t seem to be aware of them.
The mouse daemon was sitting in the pocket of the blue cardigan that the young woman had thrown over the back of her chair. He looked out, and his eyes met Pan’s, and immediately closed, like a child who thinks that if he can’t see, he can’t be seen either.
Pan wondered if the daemons could talk to one another, or whether they were mutually invisible: whether he was the only being there who could see them.
He moved slowly further into the room, closer to the mouse daemon in the blue cardigan.
The people went on talking, switching languages whenever someone else contributed a remark or a question.
They were fluent and seemingly at home in whichever language they were using.
Pan paused beneath the cardigan, which was hung casually over the back of the owner’s chair, and looked at the daemon again.
The bright mouse eyes were still closed.
“My name is Pan,” he whispered. “Can you hear me?”
“I don’t know,” came a whisper in return.
“What do you mean? You answered the question. You can hear me. What’s your name?”
“I don’t know. I had one, but it was lost.”
“Doesn’t she talk to you?”
He looked up. The young woman was talking about financial something or other; Pan couldn’t follow it. The mouse daemon tried to tuck himself further down into the pocket.
“I know you can hear me,” Pan whispered. “But I’m not sure she can. Am I right?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard.”
The little daemon sounded as if he was frightened of everything, and wanted nothing more than to be invisible.
“She doesn’t seem to hear me,” Pan said. “None of them do. Or see me.”
“They do, but they don’t notice.”
“Do you? I mean, do you see the other daemons here?”
“It’s difficult.”
“You can see me, though, can’t you? Or you could if you looked. Why don’t you want to talk?”
“We just don’t.”
“You mean ‘we daemons,’ or ‘me and my person’?”
“Both, I think.”
“You never talk to another daemon?”
“It’s wrong.”
“Who told you it’s wrong?”
“We just don’t do it.”
“Where do you come from? Do you come from the red building?”
The mouse daemon shrank away. He seemed crushed by fear and misery.
Then Pan thought of something else, and said, “Are you separated?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Do you…d’you know what I mean by ‘separated’?”
“No, no, no, I don’t want to…”
“Or do you come from a different world?”
“Please go away. Please. This is frightening.”
“Well…I don’t mean to frighten you. I’m sorry. If I see you again, I’ll pretend not to notice you.”
He felt a little frightened himself. There was something repellent as well as pitiful about the abject state of this daemon, and he wondered whether to approach another of them, but before he could move, the young woman’s chair scraped on the floor and she stood up, as if her break was over.
Two of the others began to move away with her, leaving the older woman and the man by the counter.
Pan looked for the mouse daemon to acknowledge him, but he never lifted his head from the cardigan pocket as the woman slung it around her shoulders, and then they were gone.
The young man at the counter shifted a little and poured himself another mug of coffee.
His daemon, some sort of small terrier, lay curled up at his feet, apparently asleep.
The other people continued their conversation, mostly in Italian now, which Pan could understand a little, and they were talking about money or banking, and how some new form of money was making it easier to trade.
Pan looked up at the arm of the chair, where the older woman’s lizard daemon was lying, also asleep.
He waited for a flicker of movement from the daemon, and saw none.
But the conversation was coming to an end, and then he saw something he’d never seen before: the woman gathered a bag from the floor, picked up the daemon as if he were nothing but a handkerchief, and dropped him casually inside the bag before snapping it shut and standing up.
Pan felt sick: the daemon looked boneless, as limp as a dead worm.
The woman got to her feet, said “Ciao” to the man, and left.