Chapter 6: The Nature of the Universe
The room sat in stunned silence as they absorbed the weight of the words. The Dust is opening the worlds on its own…
Lyra felt her nerves hum with excitement. She looked across the room at the faces of her companions. Mary and Will were deep in concentration, their brows furrowed. Stan leaned over Mary's shoulder, staring in open-mouthed frustration. Even Pan and Kirjava had stopped their private conversation, ears perked in attention.
Their expressions all held concern and worry, which kept Lyra from speaking. They must have understood something she did not. She knew Mary's words were a revelation, even if she wasn't sure why. It was unusual for Dust to act on its own, at least in a physical sense. It would speak to them through other mediums, like the alethiometer. Or Mary's Qi and dark matter spectrometers. But until now it had been a passive force, only influencing the fringes of human actions, never moving on its own. She had never seen it alter the physical bounds of their worlds before.
Lyra broke the silence. "But, what does that mean?" she asked, perched on the edge of her seat in excited agitation. She wanted to understand what everyone else was thinking.
Lyra's words brought Mary back to the present moment. She turned to her and Will with a glazed expression, her face was inscrutable. "Look here," Mary said, turning the computer's screen so they had a clearer view.
Lyra was not sure what she was looking at. The dots and numbers had stopped flashing across the screen and settled into a static image. She stood up and leaned over the screen to get a better view.
The screen showed a grid twisted into connected cylinders. The web of lines flared out, the material becoming wider on each end. Lyra scrunched her brow, trying to understand.
She vaguely recalled seeing similar shapes and patterns once at Jordan College. She had attended a lecture given by the Physical Sciences department. She tried not to spend more time than necessary studying maths, but the lecture's title intrigued her. A banner stating Exploring interdimensional Connections hung above the doorway to the gallery. She had hoped it was an expansion on the Lord Asriel's work. Something that would help her find a way to Will (though she dared not consciously think it). But lecture had only been on shapes interacting in the third dimension, which to her great dismay she learned they were already living in. She snuck out with Pan before the end of the lecture.
"But the knife couldn't have made that cut," Will said. "When I cut the windows between worlds the edges felt flat."
"There are ways to open the worlds without the knife," Lyra said darkly.
A vivid memory came to her of her father, Lord Asriel, ripping Rodger's daemon from him. A cold void stabbed at her stomach. Was that what happened here? Wouldn't she have noticed it that night at the garden? The glow of the tree happened so spontaneously, she hadn't seen anyone else around. Surely severing a daemon would have been enough of a commotion to grab her attention.
"No this isn't like the windows the knife would make," Mary said. "In fact, calling it a window wouldn't even be quite accurate. You see, the knife would slice the fabric of the two worlds, so that there was a hole between the boundaries. This is… a fusion of the boundaries. A connection."
Stan's agitation took over and he interjected himself. "This goes against all our research! This discredits everything we knew about Dust and the interconnected worlds before. Nothing we thought is right!"
Mary was unaffected by Stan's outburst but conceded his point. "Yes, these are all new behaviors."
She went to the computer and closed the image on the screen, bringing up instead an image of a flat graph. "The barrier had always been flat. One world exists in its entirety on one side, and the other exists in its entirety on the opposite plane. That's what made cutting the worlds so dangerous. It allowed the Dust from one world to dissipate into another. It would be the mulefa all over."
"You're saying that's not happening now?" Will asked. "The Dust isn't escaping?"
"No, these funnels meeting at a focal point are dust. That's what we've been mapping. It's acting as both the barrier and the funnel."
Lyra's heart beat so hard she feared it would jump from her chest. If this window wasn't dangerous… if it didn't need to be closed… she and Will could stay together! She wanted to dance for joy. She threw her arms around Mary in excitement. "This is amazing!"
Mary stiffened under her embrace before pulling away. When Lyra looked into her eyes, she was met with a worried expression.
Mary clicked a few buttons. The lines of the vortex expanded and curved, until they connected again on the other side. The grid now formed a large floating ring.
"If the vortex continues to expand, as it did with the surge, the worlds will collapse in on themselves. That's what broke the lenses of the spectrometer. It is colliding with atoms that are normally on the other side of this world. Two worlds cannot exist in the same place at the same time."
Lyra's heart sank, this was worse that she had imagined. "Then how are we still here? Why aren't we splintered like the lens?"
"It seems to be contained around the tree. For now, at least," Mary added. She picked up the flower stem sitting on the desk and contemplated it. "We need to understand why this is happening. If only we knew what type of tree this is, it could speed up the process."
Lyra felt her face flush, but she knew she could not put off telling Mary and longer. "It's an apple tree," she said sullenly. She glanced at Will, who looked ashamed but resolute.
"I saw the apple when I was climbing the tree and…" she paused, heat filling her face. "I ate it."
The words were soft but clear. Mary looked astonished. "You ate the fruit off the tree? Not knowing what it was?"
"It was obviously an apple," Lyra said defiantly. "You didn't see it, there was no way it could have been anything else. I know what an apple looks like."
"I ate a bite too," said Will, coming to her defense. "I agree it was an apple."
Mary did not look appeased. "Do you have the fruit with you or did you eat it all? What happened to it?"
"No," she said, straining to remember. "We each only had a bite. And then I dropped it somewhere in the garden."
"Do you think it could still be there?" Stan interjected.
"It was by a thicket of bushes. It's possible the groundskeepers haven't noticed it," Lyra said. Her face was still flush with embarrassment.
"You and Will go back to the garden and see if you can find it," Mary said. "Stan and I will stay here and continue to examine the data."
Lyra could tell she was being dismissed and felt her stomach clench. She could understand their view, but it was an apple. She was sure of it. Any collapse of their worlds was incidental timing.
Mary waited until Lyra and Will had left to release the shaky breath trapped in her chest.
"You don't think it's actually an apple tree, do you?" asked Stan, his brow furrowed.
Mary thought for a moment, the intensity of the last day giving way to a bone weariness. She picked up the small bloom.
"If it looks like an apple and tastes like an apple…" she said, a weak attempt at a joke, but the tension in her shoulders remained.
She walked across the room and opened a cabinet, pulling a cloth bundle from its depths. Stan recognized the bundle as the sticks Mary used to communicate with the Qi. He didn't understand the process. Before meeting Mary thought it all new age nonsense. But Mary trusted the Qi, and he trusted Mary, so he kept silent as she arranged herself on the linoleum floor.
Mary tried to marshal the thoughts running in her head. She knew the Dust would not speak to her unless she cleared her mind but found it difficult. Memories of the glowing tree, Lyra's return, and Dust's strange behavior filled her mind.
She threw the sticks in the air, concentrating on the question, willing her mind to remain blank. Once the sticks had fallen, she noted the lay and intersection of each. She continued the process a few times, growing more frustrated with each pass.
"What is it?" Stan asked, no longer able to quiet himself.
"I don't understand," Mary confided. "The answer is obscure. It speaks of a cycle, of the fall... of going back to the beginning."
She gave her head a small shake. "But that already happened. Lyra began our fall. It's what her Magisterium tried so hard to prevent. What more could it be?"
"I'm not sure," Stan said, struck by her words. "Do we need to prepare?"
She knew what he meant. The men in black. The war. But if it had begun again, there was nothing they could do.
"It's already out of our hands," Mary said. "It's up to Lyra and Will now."
"I would prefer if the fate of the world wasn't left to two lovestruck teenagers," Stan said.
"Yes, they have been acting that way, haven't they," Mary said with a slight smile. "But they've been through more than anyone else their age. We have to trust Lyra and Will, and the Dust."
"I don't know why we couldn't have gone this afternoon," Lyra complained. Her thighs aches from crouching behind a low wall across from the entrance of the garden. While the guards changed at dusk, she and Will would slip past the entrance.
"Because it would have been suspicious to go crawling around in the bushes with people there," Will said. His eyes didn't leave the guard patrolling the main gate.
Their hiding spot was cramped, and Lyra was glad their daemons hadn't needed to hide with them. Pan and Kirjava went ahead to begin the search without them. But Pan and Kirjarva were still looking when Will and Lyra joined them a quarter hour later.
"Are you sure you dropped it by the bench?" Pan asked.
"Yes," said Lyra, crouching on her hands and knees to get a better vantage point.
"It's possible someone took it," Kirjava added.
"It was partially eaten, but I suppose a squirrel could have made off with it," Lyra said, disheartened.
"Or a groundskeeper threw it away," Kirjava suggested.
Her chest sank as they continued to look, unable to find the apple. They were fanning out further and further from the bench, straining to see in the setting sun.
Unable to locate the apple, Lyra sat on the bench and pulled out her alethiometer. Perhaps it could help direct them to where to find it. She focused on clearing her mind. Will and the daemons gave her a wide berth, continuing their search in silence.
When Lyra's eyes refocused, Will recognized she was done asking the compass. He came back to sit with her. "Did it say where the apple went?" he asked.
Lyra frowned. "I'm not as good at reading it as I used to be, even after taking the classes. I'm not really sure what it was trying to tell me. It kept swinging between the Apple, Man, and Hourglass."
"Do you think it means that a man took the apple?"
Lyra frowned. "No, the meaning isn't usually that literal. I suspect the Apple is in this case, since it was what I asked about. But Man could have a lot of meanings. The wildness of human nature, our innate desires, or-"
Lust, she thought to herself.
She shook the thought off, glad that no one could see her blush in the dark. "The Hourglass could mean time, but it's not a measurement of time. It would be the Alethiometer symbol for that. This is something more than that."
She stared down at the gold disk, but no new information came to her.
Putting the alethiometer away, Lyra rejoined the search. She inspected a cluster of bushes that were half way between the bench and the tree. Unlike the evenings before, the tree was not glowing at all. Its bark looked unremarkable and dull in the dusk light.
She saw a movement in the bushes, drawing her eye. She crouched down, parting the stubby branches. The tail of a snake flick about and slither out of sight. She recognized the pattern on the scales- it was the serpent from the tree!
"Pan, come, help... please," Lyra called out frantically. How could she have forgotten to tell Mary about the snake? They would not likely be able to find the apple, but the snake could be important. They could take the snake back to Mary and Stan. With the snake in hand, Mary would have a new piece of information to focus on and all would be forgiven. Or at least moved past.
Pan and Kirjava darted into the bush. Lyra and Will surrounded it, attempting to corral the snake.
"Be careful!" Lyra said, watching Pan dart out of the way from the angry snake.
Kirjava leaped, getting the serpents head firmly in her jaws. The snake could not strike out.
As Kirjava came out of the bushes, there was a violent flash of wings, knocking Lyra off balance. She landed with a crash on the dirt, scraping her arm. She looked up to see Kirjava in battle with a hawk, who was prying the snake from her grip. The hawk struck out with its talons, striking Kirjava across the face.
The cat leap back hissing. Will clutched his own face in sympathy, as though feeling the cat's pain. The two young people rushed forward to grab their daemons out of harm's way.
"What was that hawk doing?" Will said, angry and shaken. "There was plenty of other prey around, it didn't need to attack Kirjava."
"That wasn't a bird of prey," said Lyra, her face white as a sheet. "That was a daemon."