The Rose Field, page 3
“You’ll remember the Barnard-Stokes hypothesis.”
“I thought the point of that was that each world is completely unreachable from any other.”
“That was a part of the mathematics put in quite late to deceive the authorities into thinking that the many-worlds idea could have no practical application, so it could be examined theoretically without falling into heresy.”
“So if these things have come through, somehow, from their own world, there might be ways for people to do so as well?”
“Yes, but they’re difficult and dangerous. Human travel is virtually impossible. But objects do find their way sometimes out of one world and into another. Chance, accident, forgetfulness.”
“Where had you seen things like this before? You said you recognized them.”
“I recognized that they hadn’t come from this world. Once you’ve learned how to see that, it’s unmistakable. It’s like training your senses, the way a piano tuner learns to recognize harmonies and intervals. I had no idea what they were used for until I met a traveler who had seen them and spoken to the strange people who used them. I’ve told no one but you, but the time has come for them to be used again.”
All kinds of possibilities flickered across her mind like the figures in a phantasmagoria. He sat calm and steady, returning her gaze.
“What do you do, Mr. Makepeace?”
“I used to work at what we once called experimental theology. That term seems to be going out of favor these days, so I like to let it be known that I am an alchemist.” Something changed in his expression. A little glint, a shimmer of complicity, and she knew they understood each other. He closed his briefcase. “Time is pressing, Mrs. Godwin. But I would like a receipt for these things.”
“My secretary will make one out.” She pressed a button and spoke briefly to him, before turning back to Makepeace. “May I know where you live?”
“In Oxford, in the district they call Jericho. Juxon Street, to be precise.”
The door opened, and her secretary came in with two copies of a typed receipt, which she and Makepeace both signed.
He took his copy and stood up. They shook hands, and she came to the door with him.
“Thank you for bringing me these,” she said. “And you think I can discover how to use them?”
“I do. And if whoever you’re communicating with can find out anything at all about the alkahest, they would be doing something very valuable.”
“The alkahest? What’s that?”
“A term from alchemy. Mrs. Godwin, your political masters will quite soon find out this address. I think it would be wise to move before they do.”
“I’ve always liked the sound of Hemel Hempstead,” she said. “Such a romantic name.”
Another little flicker: he understood. He smiled, and nodded, and left.
“Well, David,” said Glenys Godwin to the secretary. “Now we’ve got some work to do.”
* * *
—
Marcel Delamare, President of the High Council of the Magisterium, didn’t often leave the building in Geneva, known as La Maison Juste, that held his office. His comfortable apartment in a nearby building overlooking the lake, the cathedral, an occasional visit to a restaurant or a concert, and a walk along the lakeshore for his health; the world he moved in was quiet and well-ordered. He hadn’t been to the mountains since he was a very young man, when he’d thought that an enthusiasm for climbing would be a useful part of a well-rounded reputation.
So it had been at least twenty-five years since he had trodden the snowy paths above Les Diablerets, and he had never taken the route that led to the phenomenon he was now examining. In fact, said his guide, hardly anyone ever had. If the third man present was familiar with it, he didn’t say; he said very little. Colonel Schreiber was completely at home in the mountains, and like other senior officers under the command of what used to be known as the Consistorial Court of Discipline, he was used to keeping quiet. His stocky form and his Franz Joseph beard and mustache and bare chin were familiar to all those under his command.
The thing they were looking at stood among densely growing pine trees in a steep valley, and Delamare had never seen anything like it. It looked as if someone had cut a hole in the air.
It was hard to see, and in the pale afternoon light it might easily have been missed by anyone who wasn’t looking for it, because the land on the other side—through the hole, so to speak—was very similar to everything around it on this side: pine trees, a rocky slope under snow. It was so much the same that anyone walking there might have missed it, not least because all their attention would have been focused on keeping their footing on the steep rocky slope under the snow.
“Do they all look like this, Beamish?” he said to the guide.
Hugo Beamish was a lean, grizzled, sunburned man in his forties. “Yes, they do,” he said. “All roughly this size, all in isolated places, not easy to get to, not easy to see.”
Delamare found a firmer footing and leaned closer. The edge of the hole in the air was clearly visible when he was close, but not so easy from a little way back. The opening was big enough for an adult man or woman to step through, and irregular in shape: no straight edges or smooth curves, more like something cut freehand and perhaps in a hurry.
“What happens when—Colonel, I wonder if you would oblige—could you go behind it, so to speak, from the side…” said Delamare, moving carefully back a step or two.
Colonel Schreiber did as he was asked. Balancing lightly on the snow-covered rocks, he stepped up to the opening from the side and moved behind it. He vanished at once. His dæmon, a porcupine, hadn’t gone with him, and was intensely agitated: she whimpered and rattled her quills, scuttling back and forth in front of the opening.
Delamare took a deep breath. The guide had seen this thing before, and leaned on his stick and just watched.
“Colonel? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, I can hear you, but I can’t see you. Either of you.”
“Would you come back, please?”
Schreiber appeared as if he’d just stepped out from behind a building, though there was nothing to see but the steep rocky slope, the close-growing snow-covered trees.
“Stand where I am, if you please,” Delamare said, “and watch as I go through.”
The colonel moved next to him. Delamare was conscious of a feeling something like fear, but deeper and stranger. He stepped up in front of the opening and looked through as he’d done a moment before, and then stepped forward and into the space behind it. His owl dæmon went with him, but she gripped his shoulder ferociously.
He looked all around. He might have been in his own world, in Switzerland, in a forest above Les Diablerets, on a cold pale day. Everything was almost the same; but something fundamental was different, and he couldn’t tell what it was.
It made him uneasy, so he stepped back through to join the other two.
“Very well,” he said. “Now back to Geneva.”
* * *
—
The following morning, Monsieur Delamare welcomed the guide to a small office not far from the central railway station. They weren’t meeting at La Maison Juste: the President wanted to keep his visitor away from that building, for various reasons, and this anonymous and undistinguished little place, which was rented in the name of a nonexistent firm of accountants, served his purpose well.
Hugo Beamish was unique among Delamare’s advisers in that his background lay not in theology, or law, or finance, but in geography. He was English, and the path of his career had traced a convoluted journey from the Hampshire rectory in which he’d been born, through academic work in Cambridge and fieldwork in northern New Denmark and the Siberian Arctic, to the office of the Director of La Maison Juste, who had become the President of the new High Council of the Magisterium. Marcel Delamare had sent him on this unusual and exceptionally confidential mission two years before, seeing in Beamish a man whose diligence and taciturnity were quite out of the ordinary. He was glad to see that his confidence had been justified.
The office they met in was small, but clean and warm; the furniture was anonymous, modern, and functional; the sun was shining outside, coffee was served.
“Now, Beamish,” said the President, “how many of these things have you discovered?”
“Seventeen,” said the guide. “In every part of the world. That’s to say, seventeen I have personally visited. There are others I’ve heard about, eight to be precise, but haven’t yet seen in person. All my notes, all the map references and so on, are here for you.” He indicated a bundle of five or six bulging cardboard folders, tied together with heavy cord, which lay on the low table between the two chairs.
“Pictures? Photograms?”
“The phenomenon has a strange effect on photogrammic film. I’ve taken pictures of what is to be seen through the opening, and what there is on this side, but the emulsion seems to be disturbed in some way by what happens when light from both sources falls on it. There will be a way of doing it, but I haven’t succeeded yet. The pictures I have are in the files, among the other notes.”
“And how are they regarded by the local people, these doorways?”
“If they know about them at all—they often don’t—they talk about them with fear and superstition. In some places they’re believed to be entrances to the spirit world, something like that, and avoided and shunned. In general, very little is spoken about them—that’s what made the search so difficult.”
“And did you go through in every case? Did you explore what was on the other side? I take it you weren’t put off by local legends?”
“No, I went through, in each place I found. Again, the details are in the notes. The doorways I found were all in wild places, with only two exceptions, and the landscape on the other side was usually very similar, as it was with the one we saw yesterday—as if the place had been chosen for that very reason. But in every case I had a distinct impression…”
He looked troubled.
“Go on,” said Delamare calmly. “You’re reporting something strange, not committing heresy. What were you going to say?”
Beamish cleared his throat and said, “When I stepped through any of those doorways, I had the distinct impression that I was in a different world. Not like being simply in a different country, or a different climate, a different landscape—more than that. Somewhere not in this world.”
“Did your feeling at that point have a spiritual aspect?”
Beamish hesitated again. He looked troubled, and Delamare said, “Don’t forget, you were doing this on my direct orders. No possible blame can attach to you, whatever you saw, whatever you report.”
“Thank you, sir. A spiritual aspect…I don’t know how exactly I’d know that…It was different in each place. That was another surprising thing. It was as if the doorways on this planet each opened into a different part of the universe altogether. Or…into a different universe.”
“I can see how that might be disturbing.” Delamare looked at the visitor appraisingly before standing up. “You’re looking tired, my dear Beamish,” he went on. “A glass of apricot schnapps will soon restore your vigor.”
He poured some golden liquor into a couple of glasses.
“And did you see any living creatures in those other worlds?”
“In one I could see, in the distance, the buildings of a city, and I could never have imagined…The sheer size of the buildings, the shapes…In another there were beings, creatures, at work tilling the soil. Not nearby, you understand; each doorway was placed with some care away from settlements or roads. Lonely places, well chosen.”
“These beings or creatures—tell me about them.”
“I looked at them through my field glasses for thirty minutes or so. They were the size of small horses, but six-legged, like intelligent insects. They talked among themselves as they worked the soil. I could hear their voices very distantly.”
“Did they have tools?”
“Yes, small plows or harrows, but the machinery seemed to be self-propelled, and self-directing in some way. There was a discussion at one point—one of the plows seemed to want to take a different course, and the insect-creatures tried to persuade it not to, but it had its way. They were gradually working their way towards the slope where I was watching, so I thought it best to come back through before they saw me.”
“Did you see any creatures anywhere that might have been human?”
“Once or twice in the distance, on a road. But too far away to see clearly, even with the field glasses.”
Delamare sat back, resting his head on the back of the sofa, and gazed at the ceiling. He had the air of being in deep thought.
After a minute he said, “Did you anywhere, at any stage in your travels, talk to anyone about this phenomenon? I mean, a serious, prolonged discussion?”
“Three times, Monsieur le Président. Once to a Malian scholar in Tombouctou, who told me about such a doorway in the Atlas Mountains. I looked, but I could never find it. Once to some shepherds in Mongolia, who had lost some sheep to what they thought was a raiding party from…the other world. They didn’t dare pursue and bring back their flock; they were just going to move on and avoid the place in future. And once to a spice trader in Java, who told me about a friend of his who had vanished through one such doorway and never returned.”
“You made notes of all these conversations? Names, addresses, and so on?”
“All in the files.”
“Did anyone in authority question your interest?”
“No, sir. Wherever I went it seemed to be a source of mild and rather sterile curiosity. Something that was out of the ordinary, but not fundamentally useful or interesting.”
“And did you ask how long these things had been known about? Were they spoken of in old traditions, for example?”
“In preliterate societies, times and dates easily become ‘in the time of our grandfathers’ or ‘since before the great fires’ or ‘older than the forest’—that sort of thing.”
“And are you aware of any of these things that have changed? Grown larger or smaller? Closed altogether?”
“The people who spoke about them seemed to think they had always been the same. Though, as I say, not very many people did speak about them.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Beamish. Leave your notes with me; I’ll read them avidly. Let my secretary know where you’re staying. I suggest you relax for a while after your travels. Take it easy for a week or two. Where are you staying?”
“At the Hotel de la Tour.”
“Very good. I shall want to see you again, so don’t go too far away, and expect me to be in touch.”
Delamere seemed to have made up his mind swiftly and decisively about something. Beamish, who had become quite fond of his doorways, and would have been happy to talk about them for longer, found himself outside in the quiet Geneva Sunday-morning street wondering what he’d done, and whether it had been wise to do it.
Once he could see Beamish walking away down the street, the President pressed a buzzer on his desk. A moment later the door opened, and Colonel Schreiber came in.
“You heard?”
“Every word, Monsieur le Président.”
“Those are the files. Take them when you go. Wait till Beamish has returned to his hotel room, and then have him arrested, and take everything of his out of the room and bring it away. Deal with him painlessly, but finally. I want him to vanish. Then I want you to read these files and bring to me a plan for destroying every one of those openings, wherever they are in the world. I imagine explosives would be the most effective way; try with the one we saw yesterday at Les Diablerets, and let me know the result as soon as you’ve done it. Let me know—word of mouth only—how small a force you could do it with, and what materials and equipment you’d need. Highest degree of confidentiality. If we need to meet in person, we shall do so here only, and not at La Maison Juste.”
The colonel saluted and turned to leave.
Delamare’s white owl dæmon watched him go, and then turned her head back to the President. He was watching her with a complex expression she knew well, and both loved and feared.
“Well?” she said.
“I’m beginning to see what we have to do.”
“Apart from murdering innocent geographers?”
He dismissed that with a wave of his hand.
“Things are coming together,” he said.
* * *
—
Lyra was dreaming of her dæmon, but in the waking world Pantalaimon could smell a river. Or maybe hear it: his senses were extremely sharp, but not necessarily distinct from one another. He existed normally in and out of a state of synesthesia, which he was quite happy about, especially when he heard a river. Or smelled the reeds and the mud and the fresh water.
He had come a night’s journey away from the dead city. He had no idea what this river might be called or where it would lead, but it was moving east, as he was, and when he slipped through the reeds on the bank and saw the slow-flowing water under the stars, no wider than the Thames at Westminster, his heart lifted. The guilty sorrow that had come with him as he left Nur Huda at Madinat al-Qamar seemed to fall off like a suit of clothes, and he left it behind on the bank and slipped easily into the stream.
He floated without effort past the poplars on the bank, past a little fishing village with its three or four boats tied up at a jetty, and the fires where people were cooking their evening meal, and their voices that carried quietly over the water.
He floated on. Perhaps this river would flow into a great lake, or even into the Caspian Sea. At some point between where he was and the distant desert of Karamakan there would be mountains, and perhaps he’d perish there, an unmeasurable distance away from that part of himself called Lyra, and she would perish in the same instant.
