His Dark Materials: The Complete Trilogy by Pullman Philip

Author:Pullman, Philip [Pullman, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Adventure, Epic, Fantasy, Fiction, High Fantasy, Second World Fantasy
Publisher: RHCP / Penguin
Published: 1995-01-01T02:00:00+00:00

12

Screen Language

“TELL ME AGAIN,” said Dr Oliver Payne, in the little laboratory overlooking the park. “Either I didn’t hear you or you’re talking nonsense. A child from another world?”

“That’s what she said. All right, it’s nonsense, but listen to it, Oliver, will you?” said Dr Mary Malone. “She knew about Shadows. She calls them – it – she calls it Dust, but it’s the same thing. It’s our Shadow-particles. And I’m telling you, when she was wearing the electrodes linking her to the Cave, there was the most extraordinary display on the screen: pictures, symbols . . . She had an instrument too, a sort of compass thing made of gold, with different symbols all round the rim. And she said she could read that in the same way, and she knew about the state of mind, too, she knew it intimately.”

It was mid-morning. Lyra’s scholar Dr Malone was red-eyed from lack of sleep, and her colleague, who’d just returned from Geneva, was impatient to hear more, and sceptical, and preoccupied.

“And the point was, Oliver, she was communicating with them. They are conscious. And they can respond. And you remember your skulls? Well, she told me about some skulls in the Pitt-Rivers Museum – she’d found out with her compass thing that they were much older than the Museum said, and there were Shadows –”

“Wait a minute. Give me some sort of structure here. What are you saying? You saying she’s confirmed what we know already, or that she’s telling us something new?”

“Both. I don’t know. But suppose something happened thirty, forty thousand years ago. There were Shadow-particles around before then, obviously – they’ve been around since the Big Bang – but there was no physical way of amplifying their effects at our level, the anthropic level. The level of human beings. And then something happened, I can’t imagine what, but it involved evolution. Hence your skulls – remember? No Shadows before that time, lots afterwards? And the skulls the child found in the Museum, that she tested with her compass-thing. She told me the same thing. What I’m saying is that around that time, the human brain became the ideal vehicle for this amplification process. Suddenly we became conscious.”

Dr Payne tilted his plastic mug and drank the last of his coffee.

“Why should it happen particularly at that time?” he said. “Why suddenly thirty-five thousand years ago?”

“Oh, who can say? We’re not palaeontologists. I don’t know, Oliver, I’m just speculating. Don’t you think it’s at least possible?”

“And this policeman. Tell me about him.”

Dr Malone rubbed her eyes. “His name was Walters,” she said. “He said he was from the Special Branch. I thought that was politics or something?”

“Terrorism, subversion, intelligence . . . All that. Go on. What did he want? Why did he come here?”

“Because of the girl. He said he was looking for a boy of about the same age, he didn’t tell me why, and this boy had been seen in the company of the girl who came here.

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