Chapter Thirty-Two The Pieces Gather on the Board #3
“Come to think of it…He did tell me something. Under an orange tree in Aleppo. He said the Rusakov field was…How did he put it? Associated with consciousness. We’ll ask him to tell us more, if we ever see him again.”
“Oh, we’ll see him again. He’s immortal.”
Malcolm ran his hand through his hair. The sunlight lay across his face, and lit up the golden bristles on his chin and cheeks.
“D’you want a bit more coat?” Lyra said.
“No, I’m fine, thanks.”
His eyelashes were golden too, she noticed. He turned his face away from the blazing sun, and saw her watching him, and smiled.
“Lyra,” he said, “why did Pan say he was going to look for your imagination, d’you think? Why was it that in particular he thought was missing?”
“Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I had lost it. I was reading a couple of books that he hated…They both disparaged it in different ways.”
“Simon Talbot? The Something Pretender?”
“The Constant Deceiver. Yes, he was one. He made me feel sick, as if there was nothing solid underfoot.”
“And you say that, while flying through the air on the back of a gryphon!”
“I know. I can’t think what he’d make of this. He’d have to deny his own senses. The other book was by Gottfried Brande.”
“The Hyperchorasmians. I couldn’t read it.”
“The Hypercolonics, as Pan called it.” She smiled. “He was right about those books, and I just didn’t listen to him. They were both…iniquitous.”
She looked down. She was sitting cross-legged, with her hands entwined in her lap. She opened them and looked at her left hand, the palm and the back, still swollen, still bruised, and then at her right. That was just grubby. She put them together again.
“I wonder what he thinks now,” said Malcolm.
“Pan? I’m not sure,” she said. “But it must have something to do with those openings. Maybe the imagination is a sort of wind that blows through all the worlds.”
Malcolm looked out to left and right. “It’s a good image,” he said.
“It sometimes feels like that. As if it’s true. It shows us true things.”
Lyra looked at her hands again. There was something she wanted to say, and it would only come if she tried hard and honestly to find it.
“We haven’t been in the same place, me and you, with enough time, before now,” she said after a moment.
“There’s so much I haven’t told you. These openings…
For me they have a complicated meaning. I’ve seen them being opened.
You had to cut them with a special knife.
I met a boy from another world, a boy called Will, and he and I found ourselves in the city where the subtle knife was made.
He had to fight someone who’d stolen it…
He didn’t want to; the whole story is too long to tell, even here, even now.
But he had to, and he became the knife-bearer, and the old man who had been a previous knife-bearer told him how to cut through the air and open another world, and how to close it again.
So in order to escape from danger we did that, and I’ve been in I don’t know how many different worlds, all right here, as close as this”—and she swept her hand through the air, like Serafina Pekkala’s goose daemon sweeping his wing to illustrate the same thing ten years before—“and we can’t reach them except with the subtle knife. ”
“Where’s the knife now?”
“With Will, in his own world. Unreachable. We were warned by an angel, when it was all nearly over, that it was dangerous to open other worlds, because bad things came out of the gaps between one world and another. She said we had to close all the windows we knew about and any others we found, and live only in our own worlds, because we could only be strong and healthy in our own worlds. We had to be content where we were. We couldn’t travel to other worlds, except in our imagination.
We didn’t know what she meant by that, but we believed everything she said, and went back to our own worlds, and…
Years went by. And then a few months ago Pan and I quarreled and that made him think my imagination had left me, or I’d lost it, or something.
So he went to look for it. And I was left to wonder whether he was right, or whether he was mistaken, and what the imagination was anyway, and what the angel had meant…
And that’s why I set off to follow him, wherever he went. ”
Malcolm was silent, sitting still, listening closely.
“And just a few nights ago,” she went on, “on the ferry from Baku, I saw an angel again. I thought she was the same one as before, till she spoke. And I asked her what she thought the imagination meant, and the answer she gave showed me that she knew nothing about it either, nothing at all.”
“What did she say?” said Malcolm.
“She said that the imagination was just our minds making things up, bits of fantasy jumbled together, like a dream. But she was wrong. You see, angels…They don’t know what dreams are.
They don’t make poetry or art. They don’t play.
What Pan said, the thing he said I’d lost—he was right.
It’s something fundamental. And I had lost it.
So on that ferry from Baku I saw a bit more about what it was.
It’s not something to do with good and evil, or good and bad, either.
Angels might be good, and the Magisterium might do evil things, but they’re both wrong about this.
Just…wrong. Like in the Arctic, when Pan and I saw that Dust must be good in spite of everyone saying it was bad.
Here it was again, the same idea in a different form.
It’s a sort of…” She clenched her hands, trying to find the right words.
“They think that things can only be true or not true. But what you learn when you play, or tell stories, or in a dream, is that things can be both true and not true.”
“If it’s not X, it’s got to be Y?” said Malcolm. “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”
“Yes, just like that. There’s no room for any other answer.”
“It’s a sort of binary absolutism.”
“Exactly. But some things are both X and Y. Or like when someone says, ‘Art is nothing more than pretty patterns.’ But the truth is that it’s pretty patterns as well as lots of other things.
And what that means…Well, what it means is that we must keep the windows open.
Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it—we need it. ”
“Good so far. Go on.”
“Well…” She felt unsure, and also that she was trembling on the edge of a discovery.
“I think the Rose Field, the truth about things, isn’t just out there, it’s in here as well.
And the imagination isn’t just in here, it’s out there too…
The Rose Field needs what we have as much as we need what it has.
What matters is that it must be free to flow through all the worlds.
There was something Asta said once—incompleteness or something…
A theorem…Someone’s theorem. In any system, there are things you know are true, but you can’t prove that they are if you only use arguments from inside the system. Something like that.”
“Godel’s theorem. How does that fit in?”
“Well, if that’s true, then it means that if you find a system that seems perfect and complete, where you can prove everything—then you’re wrong.
You’re not looking properly. Because we need the gaps, you see?
We need the holes where one world opens up to another.
A system isn’t complete unless there’s a hole in it.
We need the things we can’t explain, things we can’t prove, or else we die of suffocation.
The secret commonwealth. The Rose Field.
They’re necessary, and so are all the windows and doors and openings, to let the wind blow through all the worlds…
I can see it at last, Malcolm, I can see what it all means.
That’s why all the authorities want to block up the openings, and that’s why we must fight to the death to stop them. ”
“I think I always believed that,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of it like that, though. I just felt it was true.”
“Were you ever troubled about it? About that sort of thing?”
“No. About that sort of thing, as you put it, I never had any doubts. You’re much more complicated than I am, Lyra.
I’m lucky to be plain and straightforward.
When I see how much it troubles people—I mean, when they feel that something’s wrong with the world they live in, I feel sorry for them, but I can’t do much to help.
I had a friend when I was an undergraduate who worried himself to death, literally; he killed himself.
He was tormented by the question of whether he was real, and where his responsibility lay if he was unreal, and why he felt responsible if the world was empty of meaning, and what he could do about it…
His daemon stopped talking and just lay down, and then he did the same, and within a week he was dead.
I felt so sorry for him, but I couldn’t understand anything about it.
I was simple, and he was complicated, and I saw that that was a fundamental difference between us.
I accepted the world as it was, and he didn’t. He was unhappy, and I was happy.”
After a few moments she said, “Are you still happy?”
“Yes. If that means do I feel at home in the world, then yes, I do, and I am happy.”
“I am too sometimes. And you’re not simple at all. You can’t be an artificer from the realms of gold if you’re simple.”
Lyra’s mind was full of that edge-of-possibility feeling. There was something that lay just out of sight, and the prospect of it thrilled her…No, nothing so definite as a prospect. You could see prospects, but she felt this with a different sense: she felt it tremor like a mirage with delight.
She lay back and covered her eyes with the sleeve of Malcolm’s coat, holding the thought close to her like a happy dream. The gryphon flew on towards the east.
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