The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman Page B

you know things like this?”
    Wearily Lyra sighed; she had forgotten how roundabout Scholars could be. It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.
    “I come from another world,” she began. “And in that world there’s an Oxford like this, only different, and that’s where I come from. And—”
    “Wait, wait, wait. You come from where?”
    “From somewhere else,” said Lyra, more carefully. “Not here.”
    “Oh, somewhere else,” the woman said. “I see. Well, I think I see.”
    “And I got to find out about Dust,” Lyra explained. “Because the Church people in my world, right, they’re frightened of Dust because they think it’s original sin. So it’s very important. And my father . . . No,” she said passionately, and stamped her foot. “That’s
not
what I meant to say. I’m doing it all wrong.”
    Dr. Malone looked at Lyra’s desperate frown and clenched fists, at the bruises on her cheek and her leg, and said, “Dear me, child, calm down.”
    She broke off and rubbed her eyes, which were red with tiredness.
    “Why am I listening to you?” she went on. “I must be crazy. The fact is, this is the only place in the world where you’d get the answer you want, and they’re about to close us down. What you’re talking about, your Dust, sounds like something we’ve been investigating for a while now, and what you say about the skulls in the museum gave me a turn, because . . . oh, no, this is just too much. I’m too tired. I want to listen to you, believe me, but not now, please. Did I say they were going to close us down? I’ve got a week to put together a proposal to the funding committee, but we haven’t got a hope in hell . . . ”
    She yawned widely.
    “What was the first unexpected thing that happened today?” Lyra said.
    “Oh. Yes. Someone I’d been relying on to back our funding application withdrew his support. I don’t suppose it was
that
unexpected, anyway.”
    She yawned again.
    “I’m going to make some coffee,” she said. “If I don’t, I’ll fall asleep. You’ll have some too?”
    She filled an electric kettle, and while she spooned instant coffee into two mugs Lyra stared at the Chinese pattern on the back of the door.
    “What’s that?” she said.
    “It’s Chinese. The symbols of the I Ching. D’you know what that is? Do they have that in your world?”
    Lyra looked at her narrow-eyed, in case she was being sarcastic. She said: “There are some things the same and some that are different, that’s all. I don’t know everything about my world. Maybe they got this Ching thing there too.”
    “I’m sorry,” said Dr. Malone. “Yes, maybe they have.”
    “What’s dark matter?” said Lyra. “That’s what it says on the sign, isn’t it?”
    Dr. Malone sat down again, and hooked another chair out with her ankle for Lyra.
    She said, “Dark matter is what my research team is looking for. No one knows what it is. There’s more stuff out there in the universe than we can see, that’s the point. We can see the stars and the galaxies and the things that shine, but for it all to hang together and not fly apart, there needs to be a lot more of it—to make gravity work, you see. But no one can detect it. So there are lots of different research projects trying to find out what it is, and this is one of them.”
    Lyra was all focused attention. At last the woman was talking seriously.
    “And what do you think it is?” she asked.
    “Well, what
we
think it is—” As she began, the kettle boiled, so she got up and made the coffee as she continued. “We think it’s some kind of elementary particle. Something quite different from anything discovered so far. But the particles are very hard to detect . . . . Where do you go to school? Do you study physics?”
    Lyra felt Pantalaimon nip her hand, warning her not to get cross. It was all very well, the alethiometer telling her to be