Chapter 17 17. Oil and paint

Now the serpent than the lord god created any ground animal All cunning. ——"Genesis" Mary Malone wanted to make a mirror, not out of vanity, because she had no vanity, but because she wanted to test one of her ideas, and she wanted to try to catch shadow particles, without the instruments in her lab, She had to make do with the materials at hand. Murfa's techniques are useless to metal, they make unusual things out of stone, wood, thread, and shells and horns, but the metals they have are hammered from local copper nuggets, or are other metals found in river sand, and were never used for making tools, but for decoration.Before they married, for example, the Mulfas would exchange shiny copper pieces tied at the base of one of their horns, reminiscent of wedding rings.

So they're obsessed with that Swiss Army knife, the most valuable thing Mary ever owned. One day her best friend Zarif, who was called Attar, yelled in amazement, watched her open the knife, showed her all the accessories, and explained their functions as best she could in her limited language.One accessory was a tiny magnifying glass, with which she had burned a pattern on a dry branch, and it was this pattern that made her think about shadows. They were fishing at the time, but the river was shallow and the fish must have gone somewhere else.So they let the net lie across the water and sat talking on the grass bank when Mary saw the dry branch with its smooth white surface.She burned the pattern—a simple daisy—into the wood, to Attar's delight.

However, as that wisp of smoke rose from the point where the focused sunlight touched it, Mary thought: If this fossilized, scientists might still be able to find it ten million years from now. Find shadow particles around as I've already worked on them. Drowsy from the sun, she fell into deep thought until Atal asked: What are you dreaming about? Mary tried to explain her work, her research, her laboratory, her discovery of shadow particles, and the wonderful new discovery that they were conscious, and she found the whole thing to hold her back, so she longed to get back to her instrument to go.

She did not expect Attar to understand her explanation, partly because of her own imperfect grasp of their language, partly because Murfa seemed so practical, so stubbornly rooted in the mundane physical world, And most of what she said was about math, but to her surprise, Attar said: Yes - we know what you mean - we call it... and then she used a phrase that sounded like they that word of light. Mary said, light?Not light, said Attar, but... she spoke the word more slowly for Marie to hear, explaining: like the light on rippling water at sunset, this light falls in swaying patches , we call it that, but it's just a parody.

Mary had known before that imitation was their term for metaphor. So she said: It's not really the light, but you see it, it looks like the light on the water at sunset? Attar said: Yes, all murfas have this, and you have it, that's why we know you are like us, unlike those herbivores, because they don't.As strange and terrible as you look, you're like us, because you also have—there's that word again that Mary couldn't quite catch and couldn't say: something like Slav or saf, Attar As he spoke, he flicked his nose to the left. Mary was so excited that she had to keep her composure in order to find the right word.

what do you know about itwhere does it come from Attar's answer was: From us, from the oil.Mary knew she was referring to the oil in those giant seed pods. from you? When we grow up, but without those trees, it disappears again, with wheels and oil, it stays among us. As we grew up...Mary again had to keep herself from being inconsistent.One of the things she's starting to suspect about shadow particles is that children and adults respond to them differently or attract different kinds of shadow activity, didn't Lyra say that scientists in her world had discovered something like that with dust ?Dust is their name for shadows.Here it is again.

It ties back to what Shadow said to her on her computer screen before she left her world: whatever the problem is, it should be about the great change in human history typified by the story of Adam and Eve, and Temptation, Fall, Original Sin.Her colleague Oliver Payne, in his study of fossil skulls, found that there was a dramatic increase in the number of shadow particles associated with human remains around 30,000 years ago when something happened, some development in evolution, that made The human brain becomes an ideal conduit for extending their effects. She said to Attar: How long has Murfa been around?

Attar said: Thirty-three thousand years. By this time she could read Mary's expressions, or at least the most obvious ones, and she laughed at the way Mary scowled, and their laughs were so free and joyous and contagious that Mary often had to join in. Among them, but now she still looked serious and surprised, and said: How can you know so accurately?Do you have a history of all these years? Oh yes, said Attar, since we had Slavs, we had memories and awakenings, and we didn't know anything before that. What happened to make you have Slavs? We found out how to use the wheel, and one day some guy with no name found a pod and started playing, playing with her—she?

She, yes.Before that she had no name or last name.She saw a snake curled up through a hole in a seedpod, and the snake said—snake talking to her? no!no!This is an example.In the story, the snake said: What do you know?what do you remember What do you see ahead?She said nothing, no, no.Then the snake said: Put your foot through the hole of the seedpod where I am playing, and you will become wise.So she put her foot where the snake had been, and the oil got into her foot, and she could see better than before, and the first thing she saw was the Slav.It was so strange and pleasant that she wanted to share it with all her people at once.So she and her spouse took the lead with the seed pods and they found out they knew who they were, they knew they were Murfa, they weren't herbivores, they named each other, they called themselves Mur They named the pod tree, and all the animals and plants.

Because they are different, Mary said. Yes, they are different.So do the children, because as more pods fall, they show them how to use them.When the kids were old enough they also started producing slavs and when they were old enough to ride the wheels the slavs stayed with them with the oil so they understood that they had to plant more pod trees for the oil.But the seed pods were too hard and seldom germinated, and the first Murfa knew how to help those trees, and that was to ride on a wheel and make them split open, so Murfa and the seed pod trees always lived together. Mary directly understood about a quarter of what Atal had just said, but through questioning and guessing, she figured out the other meaning quite accurately.Her own mastery of the language was increasing all the time, though, the more she learned, the harder it was, because every new thing she discovered revealed half a dozen problems, each leading in a different direction.

But she clings to the Slavic theme because it's the biggest theme, and that's why she thinks about that mirror. It was the metaphor of the Slavic to a flash on water that suggested to her that light reflected like a glare at sea is polarized: perhaps shadow particles can also be polarized when they move like waves like light. I can't see the Slavs like you can, she said, but wanted to make a mirror out of tree varnish, because I thought that might help me see it. The idea excited Attar, and they immediately hauled up the net and began to gather what Marie needed.There are three good fish in the net, which is a good sign. Sap varnish comes from another, much smaller tree that Murfa grew for that purpose.By boiling the sap and infusing it into the liquor they distilled fruit juice, Moore made a milk-like substance, delicate amber in color, used as a varnish.They would put twenty coats on the wood or the shell, let each coat cure under a damp cloth, and then apply the next, gradually forming a very hard and shiny surface. They usually add various oxides to make it opaque, but sometimes they also keep it transparent, and this is what interested Mary: because the clear amber paint has the same color as the mineral called Iceland spar. The singular property of the object is that it splits the light in two, so when you look through it, what you see is multiplied. She wasn't sure what she wanted to do, she just knew that if she hung around long enough without bothering or nagging, she'd find out.She remembered quoting Keez the poet to Lyra, who immediately understood that was exactly the state of mind she had been in when she read the alethiometer—that was what Mary was looking for now. So she set to work, finding a piece of wood that was a bit flat like pine, and sanding the surface with a piece of sand (not metal: no planes) until it couldn't be flatter, which is what Murfa used, Given time and effort, it will work. Then, after carefully explaining their intentions, she and Attar visited the lacquer garden and were allowed to collect some sap.Murfa was happy to give it to her, but was too busy to attend to her.With Attar's help, she took some of the sticky, resinous sap, followed by a long boil, dissolve, and boil again until the varnish was ready to use. Using a wad of cotton-like fiber from another plant for the base, Murfa laboriously painted her mirror over and over, following instructions from a craftsman.Since the lacquer is very thin, there is almost no change in each layer, but let them cure slowly, and you will gradually find that the thickness is increasing.She applied forty layers of paint—she lost count—but by the time her varnish ran out, the surface was at least five millimeters thick. The last coat was followed by buffing: a whole day of light buffing back and forth until her arms ached and her head was so dizzy she couldn't take it anymore. Then she fell asleep. The next morning, the group went to work in a coppice they called knotwood, making sure the saplings were growing the way they were planted, clamping the traction nets between the trees so that they would grow The shape of the tree is appropriate.They valued Mary's help in the work, for she could squeeze into narrower crevices and work with her hands in tighter spaces than Mulfa could on her own. It wasn't until the job was done and they returned to the place of residence that Mary was able to experiment—or play, for she still didn't quite understand what she was doing. First she tried using that varnish layer as a mirror, but since there was no silver back, all she could see was a blurry double shadow of the wood's reflection. Then she figured out what she really needed was a finish that didn't stick to the wood, but the thought of doing another piece made her cringe, how could she smooth it out without a supporting back? It occurred to her to chop off the wood and leave the paint.That would take time too, but at least she had that Swiss knife.She peeled it away from the edge very carefully with her hands, her movements were extremely careful not to scratch the paint from behind, but in the end she just removed most of the pine, leaving a messy, splintered pile of wood firmly glued to it. On that clear hard varnish board. She wondered what would happen if it were submerged in water.Will the paint soften when it gets wet?No, said her master craftsman, it would always be this hard, but why not use this? —he showed her a liquid kept in a stone bowl that would eat through any wood in a few hours.It looked and smelled like an acid to Mary. The lacquer wouldn't do any harm at all, he said, and she could use it to mend any breaks with ease.Fascinated by her plans, he helped her delicately rub the acid onto the wood, told her how they found a mineral by some shallow lake she hadn't been to and by grinding, dissolving, and distilling, made became this acid.Gradually the wood softened and fell off, and Mary got a clear slate of brown-yellow paint about the size of a paperback page.She polished both sides until they were as flat and smooth as the best mirrors. When she looked through it... there was nothing special, it was exceptionally clear, but what she saw was a double image, the right one was pretty close to the left, about 15 degrees up. She wondered what would happen if the two painted panels were viewed on top of each other. So she took out the Swiss knife again, intending to draw a line in the paint chip in order to cut it into two pieces. After trial after trial, and repeatedly sharpening the knife on a smooth stone, she managed to make a groove deep enough to risk tearing the paint, and the groove she made was Put a thin stick in it, and press it hard against the paint sheet. She has seen glass workers cut glass like this.It worked, and now she has two paint flakes. She stacked them and looked in. The amber had deepened, like a photographic filter that accentuated some colors and suppressed others, casting a slightly different tint on the view. The strange thing is that the double image disappeared, and everything became single again, but there was no trace of the shadow. She separated the two paint flakes to observe how the changes occurred.When they were about a palm's width apart, a strange thing happened: the amber color disappeared, and everything returned to its original color, but brighter and more vivid. At that moment Attar came to see what she was doing. Can you see the Slavs now?she says. No, but I can see other things.Mary said, wanting to demonstrate it to her. Atal showed interest, but only out of politeness, without the sense of discovery that so ecstatically delighted Marie.Soon this Zarif got tired of looking through those two little smears of paint and sat down on the grass to maintain her wheels.Sometimes Murfa will trim each other's claws, purely for social reasons.Once or twice Attar asked Marie to give her a trim, and Marie in turn let Attar smooth her hair, enjoying the soft nose brushing it up and down, stroking and massaging her scalp. She felt that Attar wanted this again now, so she put down the two paint chips and ran her hands over Attar's very smooth paws - Teflon (Teflon, a kind of paint). Smooth, resting on the lower edge of the hole in the very center, which acts as a bearing when the wheel turns.Of course, their circumferences coincided perfectly, and when Mary touched the inside of the wheel with her hands, she couldn't feel any difference in texture: it was as if Murfa and the seed pod were really a whole that could magically disassemble and reassemble itself animal. Attar calmed down, and so did Marie.Her friend was young and unmarried, and there were no young males in the group, so she had to marry an outside Zarif, but contact with the outside world was not easy.Sometimes Marie thought that Atal was worried about her future, so she was not stingy about spending time with her.Now she happily cleaned away the dust and grime that had accumulated in the wheel wells, dabbing the fragrant oil on her friend's paws while Atal lifted his nose and straightened her hair. When Atal had had enough, he put on the wheels again and slid away to prepare dinner.Mary went back to her smear and immediately made a new discovery. She placed the two paint flakes a palm's apart so that they revealed the bright image she had seen earlier, but one thing happened. As she looked over, she saw a cluster of golden sparks surrounding Atal's body, visible only through a small portion of the smear, and Marie realized why: she had used her oiled Run your fingers over its surface. "Attar!" she yelled. "come back quickly!" Atal turned and slid back. "Let me get a little oil," said Mary, "just enough to put on the paint chips." Atal willingly let her run her fingers around the hole in the center of the wheel, and watched curiously as Marie applied one of the lacquer chips with a clear, sweet-smelling oil. Then she pressed the two paint chips together, turned them to spread the oil evenly, and placed them again about a palm's width apart. When she looked over, everything changed, and she could see shadow particles.If she had been there when Lord Asriel showed his black shadow projections made with a special emulsion at the Jordan Academy, she would have recognized the effect.No matter where she looked, she could see the golden light.Just as Attar described: sparkling flowers, erratic, sometimes purposeful and moving like a current.In the midst of all this was the world she could see with her naked eyes, the grass, the river, the trees, but every time she saw a conscious thing, a murfa, that light was thicker and more dynamic.It didn't blur their shapes at all, it just sharpened them more if anything. I didn't know it was so beautiful, Marie said to Attar. Oh, of course beautiful, replied her friend, and it's strange to think you couldn't see it before, look at that little guy... she meant a little child playing in the tall grass, he jumped awkwardly after a grasshopper , suddenly stopped to observe a leaf, fell down, got up again and rushed to tell his mother what happened, then was attracted by a stick and tried to pick it up, only to find ants on his nose, excitedly Yelling... There was a golden mist all over him, like that around the dwelling, the fishing nets, and the nightfires: only thicker than theirs, but not much thicker.But unlike them, it is full of whirling little streams of thought that ebb, burst, float around, and die as new ones arise. Around his mother, on the other hand, the golden light was stronger and the current moving in it was more stable and powerful.She was preparing food, spreading flour on a flat stone and making bread like pancakes or tortillas, while watching her children.The shadow, or Slav, that is, the dust that bathes her looks like a picture permeated with responsibility and wisdom. So you can see at last, Attar said, well, now you must come with me. Mary looked at her friend wonderingly, and Atal's tone was strange: as if to say that you are finally ready, we have been waiting, and now things must change. Others appeared, coming down from the other side of the mountain brow, from the house where they lived, and coming from the river: among them were members of the group, and the strange Murfa she had never seen, they Looking at her curiously, their wheels made a low and steady sound on the hard ground. where do i have to goMary said, why are they all coming here? Don't worry, Attar said, come with me, we won't hurt you. The party seemed to have been planned for a long time, because they all knew where to go and what to expect.On the edge of the village, there is a low mound with regular shape, covered with hard soil and surrounded by slopes.Everyone—Mary estimated at least fifty or so—was walking toward it.The smoke from the kitchen wafts into the night air, and the setting sun spreads a hazy golden light over everything.Mary smelled roasted corn, and the warm smell of the murfas—part oil, part warm meat, a sweet smell like horses. Atal urged her to walk towards the mound. Mary said: What happened?tell me! No, no... I can't tell you.Suttermax would have said... Marie was not familiar with the name Suttermax, she did not know the Zarif whom Atal was referring to, he was older than any Murfa she had ever seen: the bottom of his nose was sparsely There are some white hairs, and the movements are stiff, as if they have arthritis.The other Murfas circled cautiously around him.When Marie peeked through the painted glass she knew why: old Zarif's shadow layers were so rich and complex that Marie herself was awed, though she didn't quite know what that meant. The other Murfas fell silent as Sartmax prepared to speak.Mary stood close to the mound, Atal standing beside her to encourage her, but she felt all eyes on her, feeling like a freshman at school. Suttermax began to speak, his voice deep, his intonation vivid and varied, his nose moving gracefully. We all came together to meet Mary the Stranger, those who already knew her had reason to be grateful for what she had done since she came among us, and we waited until she had mastered our language, with the help of many of us , especially with the help of Zalif Attar, Mary the Stranger can now understand us. But there was another thing she had to understand, and that was Slavic, she knew it before, but she couldn't see it like we do, until she made an instrument through which to see. Now that she has made it, she has been able to learn more about what she has to do to help us. Mary, come here and stand with me. She felt dizzy, shy, confused, but she had to do it anyway, and went up to stand beside old Zarif, and she thought she'd better say something, so she said: You all make me feel I am your friend, you are kind and hospitable.I come from a whole different world, but some of us feel Slavic, like you.I am grateful to you for helping me make this glass through which I can see it.If there is any way I can help you guys, I'd be happy to do it. She spoke more clumsily than she had with Atal, and she was afraid that she hadn't made it clear.It's hard to know which way to face when you're talking and gesticulating, but they seem to get it. Sartmax said: I am glad to hear from you. We hope you can help us. If not, I don't see how we will survive. Torapi will wipe us all out.There are more of them than ever, and their numbers are growing every year.Something has gone wrong in this world, there has been murfa for most of the past 33,000 years, we have taken care of the planet, everything is in balance, the trees are lush, the herbivores are healthy, and even the occasional With Torapi coming, our numbers are always the same as theirs. But 300 years ago the trees started getting sick and we watched them anxiously and cared for them but still found them producing less and less seedlings, dropping their leaves out of season and some simply dying, which was unheard of before Yes, we searched all our memories and couldn't find the reason for all this. Of course, it's all slow, but so is the pace of our lives, and we didn't know that until you came.We have seen butterflies and birds, but they are not Slavic, you have.Although you look weird, you are quick and agile, like a bird, like a butterfly.You realize you need a thing to help you see the Slavs, and you immediately concoct an instrument to use it from materials we've known for thousands of years.With us, you think and act at the speed of Ur.That's how it seems, that's how we know our pace seems to be slower than yours. But this fact is our hope that you can see what we can't see, you can see connections, possibilities and alternatives that we don't see, just as you can't see the Slavs.Since we don't see a way to survive, we hope you can.We hope you will quickly discover the cause of the tree's disease and find a cure, and we hope you will invent a way to deal with the torapi, who are so numerous and powerful. We want you to act quickly, or we'll all die. There was a murmur of agreement and approval from the crowd, and they all looked at Mary, who felt even more strongly like a schoolboy who had just entered an elementary school that had high expectations for her.She, too, had a strange sense of flattery: the notion of her being quick, swift, and bird-like was new and delightful, for she had always thought of herself as stubborn and procrastinating, but she had the accompanying feeling that, If they saw her that way, they were completely mistaken: they had no idea that she could not fulfill their desperate hope. But, she has to finish.They are waiting. Suttermax, she said, Murfa, you trust me and I will do my best.You have been kind, your life is good and beautiful, and I will try to help you.Now that I've met Slav, I know what I'm doing, thank you for trusting me. They nodded and murmured, and they nuzzled her head as she came down.She was horrified by what she had promised to do. At the same moment, in the world of Magpie City, the assassinated priest Gomez is climbing a rough path in the mountains through a tangle of olive groves.The evening sun slanted through the silvery leaves and the air was filled with the chirping of crickets and cicadas. Ahead of him he could see a small farmhouse hidden among vines, a goat bleating, and a spring trickling from gray rocks.An old man was tending something near the house, and an old woman led the goat to a stool and a bucket. In the village not far behind them, the villagers had told him that the woman he was following had been here, and that she had talked of going up the mountain.Perhaps the old couple had seen her, at least he might be able to buy some cheese and olives here, and drink from the spring.Father Gomez is very used to a simple life and has a lot of time.