Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Oxford

'Did everybody follow that all right?'  Mary beams at her audience.

'Clear as mud!'

'What?'

'I'm sorry.  I didn't understand a word Mary said.  What are all those funny squiggles on the screen?'

Will: 'I think I'd better summarise.  Mary; shoot me down if I get it wrong.

'You probably know that all this,' waving his hand around the room, 'matter is made of atoms and molecules.  Tiny objects which are the building-blocks of the universe.  There are molecules for every kind of matter – oxygen molecules that we breathe, water molecules that we drink, and so on.  Sometimes a molecule contains only the same kinds of atoms, like oxygen.  Sometimes it's made up of two or more different kinds of atoms; like water which has got hydrogen and oxygen atoms in it.

'OK so far?'

Everyone is happy, even Guilietta, who is half-asleep.

'The atom which is most important to us is carbon, because it's in  the molecules that our bodies are made of.  Carbon is a special atom in another way, because it can be put together in lots of different arrangements to make molecules.'

'Those are the allotropes I was talking about.'

'That's right.  The amazing thing is that the different… allotropes of carbon have fantastically different properties.  The lead in this pencil is made of graphite, which is a slippery-slidey form of carbon.  It rubs off onto paper very easily.  The soot in a fireplace or a lamp chimney – that's carbon.  Then there's diamond, which isn't black or slippery and is nearly the hardest and sharpest substance there is – that's carbon too.

'That's not all.  Mary talked about something called a buckyball.'

'That's where I lost her completely!'

'Right, Judy.  It's a typical scientist joke.  A buckyball is a carbon molecule that's got sixty carbon atoms in it.  They form a hollow sphere with the atoms arranged in a lattice around the outside.'

'But why's it called a buckyball?  What sort of silly name is that?'

'It's named after a twentieth-century chap called Buckminster Fuller, who designed and built lots of hollow domes.  They had the same geodesic structure as the C60 molecule.'

'But Will, I don't understand.  What have these bucky-things got to do with the Knife?'

'Just one more step, Giancarlo.  The buckyball; it's like a net.  You could imagine pulling it from two sides and making a sort of string with it.'

'They tied us up with fishing nets!  In Siemione!'

'Spot on, Guili.  What you get if you fiddle about with a buckyball and pull it out straight is called a buckythread.  It's a very strong thread, very narrow, made up of a lattice of carbon atoms.

'Mary thinks, and so do I, that Jack Farrell's arm was cut off by a length of buckythread.'

'The thing is,' Mary says, 'that buckythread is very hard to make.  I mean, you could make a very short length, a few nanometres long, quite easily in the laboratory.  But the piece that cut off Jack Farrell's arm must have been much longer than that.  Perhaps as much as half a metre long.'

'So Mary asked around the scientists at the conference she's at to see if anyone is trying to make buckythread in significant amounts.'

'And I got an answer, and it's a very interesting one.  There's a firm called Geodesics Ltd who've been doing a lot of work with long-chain molecules for the past six or seven years.  The very interesting thing about them is that they're renting space in the old JET facility at Culham.'

'Culham?  That's near Abingdon!  Where Jack Farrell said he came from!'

'Right, Judy.'

'Wait a moment!  Look for the Ring…  JET… Mary, are you thinking what I'm thinking?'

'The Ring… Yes, Will – it has to be!  That has to be the place the alethiometer meant!'

Oxford

Guilietta has been put to bed and Mary has disconnected from the meeting to get some much-needed sleep.  Will, Kirjava, Judy and Giancarlo watch a little TV and drink coffee.  Remiel has gone wherever it is that angels go when they are not concerned with the affairs of men.  Angels don't watch TV either, thinks Judy.

After the news, Will and Giancarlo talk over old times.  Judy learns much more about the nature, up until now completely beyond her knowledge, of the worlds in which she lives and the great war that was fought, all unseen and unknown by her, between the forces of the Magisterium and the Republic of Heaven.

'And you're saying that the Authority died, and the usurping angel Metatron too?'

'We believe he died, although nobody saw it happen.'

'All the Powers and Principalities?  They passed on and left us free?'

'It was worse in Lyra's world. The Domination of the Church, I mean.  It was like – oh, as if the Spanish Inquisition had taken over in our world.  There were excommunications, and tortures and secret societies and Church Police and Church courts.  It was terrible, but, oh, it was so wonderful too.'  Will strokes Kirjava's supple back.

'There were things we saw and people we met that I can't forget.  I'll never forget them.  For as long as I live…'

'The talking bears you told me about.  And those tiny people, riding on their dragonflies.'

'They were as fierce and proud, and as great-hearted, as they were small.   The harpies, and the witches too.  Serafina Pekkala.  Lee Scoresby and his balloon…

'Oh Judy!  You've no idea how good it feels to have somebody to talk to about it all!'

'You mean, like the Pevensies and Aunt Polly and the Professor.   They met together to talk about Narnia after they returned to their own world.'

'To keep their memories alive in their hearts.   Reepicheep and Aslan, the Dawn Treader and Cair Paravel.'

'Our beautiful castle by the sea, at the mouth of the Great River.  How could we ever forget?'

'The walls of Minas Tirith and the Pelennor Fields.  Legolas and Gimli…'

'The city of Nessus…'

'Severian the Torturer!  Yes!'

'Aramaath and Orodril…'

'…in the Last Redoubt!'

'How could we ever forget?'

They sit hushed for a while, gazing intently at each other.

Will suddenly says to Judy:  'He's a jackdaw!  Kir, can you see him?'

'You should know me better than that.  I've been able to see him for weeks.'

'Who?'

'Your daemon!  Just behind you, on the bookshelf.  No… he's on the TV.  Now he's on your knee.'

'Stop it!'

'No, really.  If Mary were here she'd be able to show you how to see him.  It's a trick – you have to look sideways, out of the corner of your eye.  It works best if you don't try too hard.

'Don't worry if you don't see him straight away.  It'll come.'

'I believe you.  Thousands wouldn't.  But look; there was something I was going to ask you.'

'Ask away.'

'You said there was a war in Heaven, and the good people won and the bad people lost.'

'Yes.'

'And the victory was won for us all – for everyone in all the worlds, you, me, Giancarlo and Guilietta, Lizzie and Lyra.

'But there's still so much evil loose everywhere.  The Oil Wars here, the troubles in Giancarlo's world.  Why hasn't everything got better in the last, what is it, twelve years?'

Will thinks for a while.  Then:

'It's like this.  Imagine that you're a prisoner, chained up in a deep dark underground dungeon.'

'Like Christian the Pilgrim in the castle of Giant Despair?'

'Or Toad, in The Wind in the Willows.  Right.  Now, one day, there's a revolution, or something like that, and all the doors of all the dungeons are thrown wide open and all the padlocks are struck off your chains.'

'You're free, then.'

Will shakes his head.  'You're still in a dungeon.  You've got to get up onto your feet, and pass through the doors, and climb the stairs out of the keep, and enter the castle courtyard, and walk under the gatehouse, and cross over the drawbridge, and go out into the open air before you can really say you're free.

'We're like that.  The chains have gone and the doors are open.  All we've got to do is stand up and walk out of gaol…'

Giancarlo leaves the room and lets himself out through the back door of Will's flat.  He walks down to the canal side and sits there by himself for a while, listening to the sounds of the city; the ever-present traffic, a TV here and a stereo there.  The glow of the streetlights is reflected by the water of the canal; there are lit windows in the houses up and down the bank.  People are calling out to each other in the street; they are going out to the pubs, clubs and restaurants of Oxford, visiting each other's houses, never, as it seems to him, stopping to rest.  This was my world, once.  If he were sitting now on the pantiled roof outside his bedroom window in his father's house in Cittagazze, he would see nothing but what the living moon and stars chose to show him, and hear nothing but the sighing of the night-wind in the cypress trees.

This place is noisy and busy, dirty and dangerous.  Home is warm, so beautiful and yet – there is a canker at the heart of his world.  The Knife.  While there is still the possibility of using it to steal objects and knowledge from other worlds, his people will never recover the will to rebuild their own world using their own resources.  The Knife has robbed his people of the vitality which is everywhere here.  We used to be a great people.  We were philosophers, builders, inventors.  Now all we can invent are perverted religions, like the Church of St Tullio.  The philosophers of the Torre degli Angeli committed an act of terrible hubris when they created the Knife, but they made great works of scholarship and imagination as well.

When I return to Ci'gazze, I will have a new Task.  Before, I only had to save a few hundred Exiles.  Now, I have a whole world to redeem.

When Giancarlo returns to the flat, the sitting room is deserted and there is a faint light showing under the door of Will's bedroom and low voices within.  He smiles to himself, rolls up in his duvet and goes to sleep.

Tomorrow.  My Task begins tomorrow.