The Rose Field, page 10
“But how could your agent know all that, if he couldn’t go out of the other door?”
“I do not know. Perhaps he was allowed to look out of it. And now you tell me that he had been looking at another world?”
“If I’m right…But please, could you keep that to yourself?”
“You have told this idea to no one else?”
“No one. Could I speak to this man, I wonder?”
“His dæmon became sick later, and they both died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry…And Mustafa Bey, have you ever heard the term alkahest? The alkahest?”
He shook his head. “Never. Is that a term of botanical science?”
“I don’t think so. I heard it and just wondered what it meant.”
“It is unknown to me.” He sipped the tea. A waiter, watching from some way off, saw this and hastened to refill his cup before withdrawing again. “Tell me this,” Mustafa Bey went on. “Why do you want to go to this place? There is no need. I can supply what they produce.”
“In the hope of finding someone I used to know,” she said. She was taken aback by the faintness of her own voice.
The merchant nodded. His expression was serious and preoccupied. His dæmon spoke again, in a rumbling whisper, and he bent his head a little to hear her.
Lyra sipped her tea, which was now cold. This was all so difficult…Then she remembered Farder Coram all those years ago in the town of Trollesund, talking to Dr. Lanselius, the Consul of the witches, in his neat little parlor. The answer to the question Farder Coram asked had led them to Iorek Byrnison, and the success of their expedition. She’d followed his example once before, and that had worked too.
“If you were me,” she said now, echoing Coram’s words, “what question would you ask of Mustafa Bey?”
The great merchant looked at her steadily for several seconds. She couldn’t read his expression, but she felt he was reading her, and clearly too.
“I would ask him to tell me what he knows about your servant,” he said.
“My—oh, Master Parathanasius, my personal magician, mon sorcier particulier. Why? What do you know about him?”
“He used to be a professor of mathematics at the University of Alexandria.”
“What? When?”
“Until about ten years ago. There was a scandal, possibly sexual, possibly financial, possibly political, possibly all of them. The details are unimportant. He had to resign his position. Since then he has had many occupations, including that of spy, but never before, I think, that of personal magician.”
“A spy? For whom?”
“Commercial interests, mainly. He has also worked for various governments, including that of Muscovy. With the authorities in Geneva, however, he has had no dealings of any kind, as far as I have heard.”
“He sounds very well known, for a spy. I thought spies had to be inconspicuous. Practically invisible.”
“There are few people—I think very few indeed—who would be able to tell you this. I can, because I became interested in him. Perhaps one day I shall employ him myself. What name did he use when you engaged him?”
“Abdel Ionides. Is that not his real name?”
“Who knows? The name he used as a professor of mathematics was Rashid Xenakis. He has used many others.”
“Did you recognize him, then, when he introduced us?”
“As soon as he came into the café. When I saw that he was with you, my interest was doubled. The performance he put on for the maître d’hôtel was enjoyable, but too loud. He enjoys playing a part, but he should remember to be an actor, not a star.”
“He’s been a very good guide, so far. I employed him to take me to Aleppo, but I’m thinking about suggesting he continues with me to Karamakan. Do you think that might be a bad idea?”
“Does he charge a high rate?”
“We came to a satisfactory agreement about his fee for this part of the journey.”
“He would make an excellent guide, if that was all he did. But if he agrees to do it, he will certainly have his own motives for going to Karamakan, and they might not be helpful for you.”
Lyra cast her eyes around the café without moving her head too much. It seemed like what it was: a comfortable, welcoming place with a wealthy, cosmopolitan clientele. If anyone was watching her and Mustafa Bey, she didn’t see them.
“Rashid…?” she said quietly.
“Rashid Xenakis.”
“A Greek surname again, and an Arabic first name. Well, Mustafa Bey, you have given me a lot to think about. I’m very grateful to you. But you said something was going wrong with the rose-oil trade.”
“It is. Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly, and things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way.”
“Things like…What sort of things?”
“Things we trusted. You will see examples all around if you look. Whether this infection is coming from the east, the west, the north, the south, the air or the water, the earth or the fire beneath it—I don’t know. Queen Tatiana, let me put it like this: it would be useful for me if you succeeded in your journey to the red building, because I would be very interested to know what you find in there, and indeed on the journey. Therefore, I would like to help you. For example, I can provide you with a safe journey, and a much quicker one than you would manage on your own. There is a new fleet of international buses, extremely comfortable and fast, in which I have an interest. Camel-trains are unrivaled for transporting goods, but believe me, you would be vastly better served by one of my buses, for the first part of your journey at least. In exchange I would like you to do something for me: I have agents and representatives in every city you will visit on the way. Written reports of anything you find out, or hear, or discover, sent to me through those agents en route, would amply repay any help I can give you. They are not hard to find.”
“Mr. Ionides will realize what I’m doing. He’s too clever for me to do it without being noticed. He’ll have to know.”
“I would expect that.”
“And what about the Magisterium?”
“Of course, report what you hear about them.”
“That wasn’t what I meant. What’s your relationship with them?”
“Polite but distant. We have different concerns.”
Lyra toyed with the baklava and licked her fingers automatically. “Very well,” she said. “I agree. Thank you.”
He signaled to his secretary again. The man came at once, carrying a small leather box, which he set down on the table. Mustafa Bey opened the lid to reveal a rosewood writing-case. The secretary waited with hands folded and eyes averted while the great merchant uncapped a fountain pen and wrote a short paragraph in Arabic script, and another paragraph in what looked to Lyra like Cyrillic.
Lyra saw all that with unfocused eyes. She was thinking of Ionides as a professor of mathematics; it was both difficult and easy. Should she ask him?
Finally Mustafa Bey wrote one last paragraph in English, before blotting the paper and handing it to her.
She read:
The bearer of this letter is Her Majesty Queen Tatiana Iorekova. She is my personal emissary, and is to be given every courtesy and assistance wherever these three languages are spoken.
Mustafa Bey
“Thank you,” she said.
He took it back and inked his large signet ring on a pad held out by the secretary before pressing it carefully at the foot of the letter. The ink was blood-red.
“I’ll write to you about everything I discover,” she said. “I really am very grateful.”
He stood up. She extended her hand, and once again he bent to kiss it. As he left her table and returned to his own corner of the café, she could feel the attention receding from her like a tide and following him, and presently when she left, with the ink dried and the letter folded in her pocket, no one took any notice of her at all.
* * *
—
The research station where the murdered botanist Dr. Hassall had worked stood empty for some weeks. The men from the mountains had swept through it like a cyclone, killing many of the staff, smashing windows, tearing off roofs, scattering scientific equipment and plant specimens, and ransacking every part of the buildings. They hadn’t come to steal anything: just destroy it. Laboratories, greenhouses, administration offices, bathrooms, the accommodation block, the kitchen, the common room where people could relax and talk together, the janitor’s stores—all torn open, all scattered and smashed. The planting beds outside, the ranks of plants carefully germinated and tended for their potential value in medicine or commerce, were driven over and set ablaze. The distillery and all its equipment where the essence of various plants was distilled into tiny vials of precious oil were broken up and shattered beyond repair.
The men from the mountains, having completed their priestlike task, vanished as swiftly as they had appeared. When people from the nearest village came carefully to see what had happened, they found the bodies of several scientists from Europe and Africa as well as those of their own people, cooks and cleaners and outdoor workers; they buried them all with the respect and care their own customs commanded, and searched through the ruins for anything still usable. Cooking vessels had generally survived, and so had various kinds of tools, and nonperishable kitchen supplies; and items such as these, which had escaped the wrath of the holy purpose, were soon being used in local households or traded in villages and settlements as much as a day’s ride away.
One man who came back to the ruined station several times was Chen, the camel-herder who had guided Strauss and Hassall to the red building at the heart of the desert. He had lost most of his animals—the men from the mountains had driven them away, or killed them—and he was reduced to an extremity of destitution he’d never known before. But he was convinced that there was more left in the research station than the men from the mountains had managed to destroy, and he had no fastidious reluctance to search through filth, ash, broken glass, soil, sand, rotten food, or anything else; he set about the job with a will.
He took to sleeping in one of the storerooms that still had a ceiling, and furnished it with torn cushions, soiled blankets, and rolls of horticultural fleece that kept him warm at night. It was more comfortable than any place he had ever known; there was still enough dried food to scavenge, and he was never disturbed. He made sure of that by howling and screaming in the night, and by setting fire to some kind of oil he found in the distillery, so as to illuminate various crude devil-masks he made from scraps of wood and cardboard. Soon the station was known to be haunted, and Chen was master of all he surveyed.
Five
Number Theory
Lyra found Ionides on a bench near the fountain, reading a newspaper in the full sun. It was just past midday, and men in shirtsleeves and women with parasols were strolling comfortably through the square, tempted this way or that by the smell of grilling meat or spices or baking bread, or sitting on the low wall around the fountain to enjoy the coolness of the drifting spray.
Lyra sat down beside Ionides and took off her royal ribbon.
“You not a queen now?” he said.
“No. I’m traveling incognito.”
“And me no more sorcier?”
“No. You’re in disguise as a poet.”
His gecko dæmon laughed, a little silvery sound. He folded his newspaper. “Not the first time,” he said cheerfully.
“Come and walk with me. I want to find somewhere quieter under the shade of some trees, a garden of some kind or a park. I’m sure you could find somewhere like that.”
“This way,” he said. “The Ambassador of Brazil was a generous man. He give his embassy and garden to the people of Aleppo in memory of his wife. Is very romantic. Lot of trees.”
“What did the Brazilian government have to say about that?”
“He not tell them yet. Too late now.”
The sidewalks were too crowded to let them talk easily, so Lyra said nothing as Ionides led the way. No doubt the people now coming out of their workplaces for lunch would take a siesta afterwards, unless the desire to make more money was stronger than the desire to lie down in a cool place. Again Lyra was struck by the charm of the city, the pleasure in the faces and voices around her, the straightforward sensuous joy in the fact of having a body in a world that suited it so well. She hadn’t felt anything like that since Pan left—in fact, since before that: the last time she’d felt so uncomplicated was on one of those long summer evenings with Dick Orchard by the river, his hands on her body and hers on his, kissing and being kissed while Pan and Dick’s pretty vixen dæmon played nearby. As she and Ionides entered the embassy garden, she felt a pang so sharp that she couldn’t help a soft murmur of pain and loss.
Ionides stepped a little closer, as if to catch her if she stumbled, but he said nothing. They walked along a graveled path to a bench under a wide-spreading cedar tree.
She sat, and then he joined her.
“Now, Mr. Ionides,” she said, “I want you to tell me about the good numbers and the spaces between them.”
“Good numbers? Forty is a good number for dollars,” he said. “And the space between me and forty dollars is very wide.”
“Well, all right, that was a good answer. Let’s get that over with first.” She counted out thirty dollars. “That is what I owe you, and this”—an extra ten—“is what I’ll add to it if you agree to go with me to Karamakan.”
“Same rate as to Aleppo?”
“Certainly, provided we can agree on the distance and the time.”
“All right, Miss Silver, I trust you. We shall count as we go.”
They shook hands. His grip was firm and dry and cool. He folded the money away.
“Now,” she said, “again. I want to know about the good numbers. Don’t try to fool me.”
“How you know if I fool you or not?”
“When you’re not telling the truth, your left eyelid flickers. I’ve noticed it before. Now come on, I want to know.”
“Where you hear about good numbers?”
“In the dead city. In Madinat al-Qamar. There were voices speaking to me, and they said they came from the gulfs between the good numbers. They wouldn’t tell me any more than that.”
“You mind if I smoke?”
“Can you smoke and talk at the same time?”
“Yes. Easy.”
“Then I don’t mind. What do you know about good numbers?”
He fished a cigarette from a battered packet and struck a match. He blew a thin stream of smoke, watching her with eyes whose lids didn’t flicker at all.
“There is so many kind of numbers,” he said. “There is numbers on the number line, like one and two and minus forty-six and eleven point five. Then there is numbers that go on forever, like pi. Then there is prime numbers. You know prime numbers?”
“Yes.”
“Then there is infinity.”
“Is that a number?”
“No. But this is where we think about it. Then there is imaginary numbers, like square root of minus one.”
Lyra remembered: that laboratory on the very edge of the world, the endless Arctic night, her father explaining something…She nodded. “I know about them,” she said. “Go on.”
“Question for you, Miss Silver. Square root of minus one. Did it exist before someone think about it?”
“It must have done…I think. It was hidden, but it was there.”
“And you think that is the only kind of number that is there but we can’t see?”
“No,” she said slowly. “Probably. There might be others we haven’t thought about. Actually there must be.”
“Like maybe good numbers.”
“Ah.”
“Maybe.”
He blew a smoke ring that floated away and wavered and frayed and broke up. It wasn’t difficult, Lyra decided, to imagine him in the academic dress of a scholar, giving a lecture on mathematics to a room full of students.
“Is that all?” Lyra said.
“There might be moving numbers,” he said. “Or Viennese numbers. Or dark numbers, or heavy numbers. Or bad numbers.”
“Those words could mean anything.”
“They could be names for kinds of numbers we haven’t discovered yet.”
Something from a physics class stirred in her memory. She tried to see it clearly, but it shimmered for a moment, like a goldfish, and then retreated into the depths.
“You know about fields?” she said. “I mean, fields like the gravitational field or the electromagnetic field. Spaces where some kind of influence works.”
“I know what field means. What is it you mean?”
“I wondered if the good numbers could describe points in a particular field.”
He didn’t say anything for over a minute. His expressions changed rapidly: abstract, troubled, calculating, speculative, amused, mischievous, melancholy. He might have been acting: perhaps none of them meant any more than that he knew she was watching him. Or they might have been true pictures of his thought. His left eyelid didn’t flicker, but she’d made that up anyway.
“Well?” she went on. “Suppose, like numbers we can’t see yet and we can’t see them because we haven’t imagined how they could exist…If we didn’t know about that particular field, we wouldn’t have thought it needed particular numbers to describe it. What then?”
