Chapter Thirty-Three Into the Red Building #3
“No, they know exactly what they’re doing. Get the road clear in your mind, and then it all makes more sense. There’s something to admire about the scale of it; changing the whole shape of the landscape…”
“But…They’re destroying everything. Not making it better.”
“They’d probably say ‘developing.’ But I agree. Let’s see if we can get to the town.”
This land had supported other crops as well as roses; as they made their way across the overturned earth, Malcolm and Lyra saw torn-up orchards of apples and apricots, and a wide meadow that had been growing some kind of oil plant, Malcolm thought, and was now being cleared for the foundations of what might have been a factory or a warehouse.
The air was filled with the sound of machinery; the occasional shouts of query or command were the only evidence of human life.
There must be people controlling the machines, Lyra thought, but she could hardly see them.
A face behind a windscreen, a man in overalls climbing down from a cab to adjust a lever, a supervisor with a hard hat and a clipboard pointing something out to a crane operator; all of them busy, no one just looking on or wandering by.
“Can you see any daemons?” she asked.
“Yes, but not many…I’m not sure.”
“This might be a world where they just don’t have them. Though they did in the picture.”
“What about the dead one?”
She shuddered. “I can’t take that in, can you?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t see if she had a wound or anything. It was just as if she’d died of…”
“No, I don’t think she was wounded. She was dead, though, wasn’t she? Not just asleep?”
“Yes. I’m afraid so. Some disease?”
“A disease that only affects daemons? Have you ever heard of one?”
“No. But you’ve seen more worlds than I have.”
“In some worlds, people don’t have daemons at all. Asta, what are you thinking about this place?”
“I’m thinking the same as you. I wish Pan was here.”
“Yes, but do you feel…I don’t know: Do you feel ill, or anything? Any sort of unease or weakness or something like that?”
“Not so far,” she said carefully. “I was shaken by that poor daemon back there…But look at those men laying pipes. Can you see their daemons?”
A hundred yards or so to their left, four men were taking a break from their task of laying heavy pipes in a newly dug trench.
Their crane was still and silent; the sun was reflected brightly from the smooth black material of the pipes waiting to be lifted from the back of a large truck next to the trench.
The men were sitting in the shade of the crane machinery, eating from bowls with chopsticks, drinking from bottles.
Nothing different from anything Lyra and Malcolm could have seen in their own world, except for the way the men’s daemons were behaving.
One was a small terrier-like dog, who tried to distract his man by scratching at his knee, and kept being slapped away.
Another was a thrush, who perched on a stone nearby, her head drooping, unmoving and ignored; the third was a small lizard-like creature, tucked into the man’s shirt pocket, her head hanging loosely outside. The fourth was somewhere out of sight.
The men looked up as they came near, but gave them only a quick glance before going back to their food.
The terrier tried again to get her man’s attention; this time he punched her hard on the side of the head and she fell down and lay there whimpering.
Lyra flinched. None of the others paid the least attention.
“Remember Gerard Bonneville?” said Asta.
Malcolm looked at Lyra. “The man I stole the alethiometer from. His daemon was a hyena. We saw him beating her with a stick. I think he’d broken her leg at some point.”
“The man who…”
“Yes. The man I killed.”
“I’m glad you did. D’you think he came from here?”
“No. He was just abominably cruel. People are cruel in our world too.”
“Yes, but it’s uncommon. That’s why we notice it. But here it seems to be just the way things are done. Automatic.”
They walked further over the turned-up earth, making for the town in the distance.
The day was getting warmer, and the sound of machinery tearing and grinding added to the oppression both Lyra and Malcolm were feeling.
They came to what had been a curve in the river, where tons of mud and soil had been dumped to make a new embankment.
Willows lay with their broken branches trailing in the water and their naked roots in the air; excavators dragged them whole and entire out of the mud and dropped them in the beds of giant dump trucks, while further along another machine was dredging a new channel for the river.
The air was full of the smell of exhaust fumes.
And no one seemed to see them, or shouted to them to move out of the way, or showed any interest in their presence.
“It’s as if we were invisible,” Lyra said. “D’you think if we actually spoke to someone…”
“We’d have to shout over the noise of the machines. And they’re all too occupied with what they’re doing. I’m surprised we haven’t been told to clear off, though. On a site back home someone would have chased us away a long time ago.”
“And they all seem to know what to do. No foremen or supervisors giving orders.”
“Wait, there’s someone. I’ll ask him.”
A man with a theodolite was checking the elevation of the wooden building that housed the opening they’d come through, nearly a mile behind them now; clearly that spot was being used as a sort of reference point.
The ground the theodolite stood on was being cleared for the foundations of a big building that might be an office block or a factory.
Malcolm waited till the man had taken a measurement and made a note, and then said, “Excuse me, can I talk to you for a moment?”
The man looked round, saw Malcolm, and shrugged.
“Can you tell me what you’re doing?” Malcolm said.
The man shook his head. Malcolm said it again, in French, and German, and Latin, and Tajik.
Each time the man just shrugged and spread his hands.
Lyra thought he looked as if he might be Persian, or Persian in her world, at least. His daemon was a pigeon, perching unsteadily on the wooden case of the theodolite.
She looked bedraggled. When Asta approached to try to befriend her, she cowered away.
Malcolm tried once more. Lyra thought he might have been speaking Greek this time, but it made no difference; the man shook his head, clearly growing impatient, and made a go-away gesture before turning back to his theodolite.
The daemon raised her wings, though, and uttered a timid coo.
The man ignored it and turned back to his theodolite.
“Well, let’s keep on,” said Lyra.
There was a track where the earth was slightly flatter than elsewhere, and easier to walk on. There was a bulldozer moving along from the town towards them, crawling on its caterpillar tracks. They moved to one side to give it room to pass; the driver took no notice of them.
“They’re just not interested,” said Malcolm. “Not hostile. Just indifferent.”
“Is it them, or us, though? Maybe it’s us being invisible.”
“I don’t think so. They can see us and hear us if they choose to, like the theodolite man. It’s an attention thing.”
“And all this building…”
“If these were rose gardens—or fields—there must be some sort of factory fairly close. A distillery. Do you know anything about how they make the oil?”
“No, but thinking about it…I suppose they’d gather just the flower heads, because they wouldn’t want the prickles.
One of the Myriorama cards shows some young women picking rose heads and carrying them in big baskets…
Actually, there was the same scene painted on the wall of the red building; Asta pointed it out.
Then, I suppose, they’d boil them in a big vat and…
I don’t know what next. Maybe crush them. ”
“No, I think boiling would be the start.”
“And distilling, that comes into it somewhere, probably. I don’t know what that means, though. Did you ever see the rosewater dishes in Jordan?”
“Enormous things.”
“I used to polish them for Mr. Cawson. He said they were running out of rosewater, and it was hard to get. I think that was the first I heard of the rose business…I wonder how Mr. Cawson is now, under the new regime.”
“I wonder how Alice is. But yes, rosewater—you’d make that, if you had lots of roses.
You’d boil the petals in a big vat and distill the steam and that would be the rosewater.
And the oil would be floating on the surface of the boiling water in the vat—not much of it—just drops. Intensely concentrated.”
“Would you need a big building? Like the one being built near the theodolite man?”
“Not if you did it on a local sort of scale. You could set the equipment up in an ordinary barn.”
“Mr. Cawson gave me a little bottle of the rosewater, because I wouldn’t be allowed to attend the Feast and that was the last of what he had…That was very concentrated, I remember.”
“I wonder where it came from. But you can see why they trade in the oil and not the rosewater.”
“Smaller quantities. Easier to carry…”
“Much easier. Most people who bought it might never suspect what else it could do.”
“Look,” said Lyra, pointing to an excavator tearing up the ground at the edge of a meadow. “The sign.”
Most of the earthmoving machines they’d seen until then had borne the signs or painted names of the companies that owned them, and both Lyra and Malcolm had noticed that they were not owned by one firm alone: many different colors of paintwork, many different styles of design, proclaimed that they were owned by many different companies.
Some of the names used Roman lettering, while others were painted in scripts Lyra had never seen before.
But the excavator she was pointing at now had the letters TP painted on the cabin door, together with the red-and-white rampant lion of Thuringia Potash.
“Well,” said Malcolm. “And I thought they were failing.”