Chapter 34 Thirty-four, show up

show the world to all of you living there every particle of dust Breathe out its pride. —William Blake Mary couldn't sleep, and every time she closed her eyes, something made her sway and tilt, as if she were on the edge of a cliff, and then she woke up with a jerk, scared and nervous. This happened three or four times, until she realized she couldn't sleep any more, and she got up, dressed quietly, and stepped out of the house, from the tent of branches and leaves under which Will and Lyra roosted. Walk away by the tree that stretches out. The moon was brightly high in the sky, and the night wind was blowing, and wonderful night spots were dotted with cloud shadows, which Mary felt were like a migratory herd of unimaginable animals.But animals migrate for a purpose.When you see herds of elk moving across the tundra, or wild animals crossing the savannah, you know they're headed for food, or a place where they can mate and breed.Their movement has meaning, whereas the movement of these clouds is the result of pure chance, the effect of utterly aimless time at the atomic and molecular level, and their shadows speeding across the steppe have no meaning at all.

Yet they seem meaningful, tense and purpose-driven. It was the same all night, and Mary felt it too, only she didn't know what the purpose was, but unlike her, the clouds seemed to know what they were for and why, the wind knew it, the grass knew it. The whole world is alive and conscious. Mary climbed the slope and looked back at the swamp, where the rising tide had cut a bright silver line between gleaming dark-black mudflats and algae beds.The shadows of the clouds over there are very clear: they look as if they are running away from something terrible behind them, or rushing forward to embrace something wonderful.But what that was, Mary would never know.

She turned and walked to the grove where the tree she used to climb to look out was twenty minutes' walk away, and she could see it clearly, tall and swaying with its great canopy The eager wind talks.They had things to say and she couldn't hear them. Spurred on by all this of the night, she hurried towards it, eager to join in. That's what she tells Will when he asks her if she misses God: the sense that the whole world is alive, that everything is connected to each other through thousands of threads of meaning.When she was a Christian, she felt this connection too, but when she left the church, she felt loose, free, and light, living in a universe without purpose.

Then the shadow is discovered and she too enters another world; now under such a vivid night sky, it's clear that everything is beating with purpose and meaning, but she's cut off from it and has trouble finding connection because there's no God . Half ecstasy, half despair, she decides to climb her tree, trying to lose herself in the dust again. But she was not halfway there when she heard another sound besides the flapping of the leaves and the wind in the grass.Something groaned, like the deep, melancholy notes of an organ; and there were cracklings, too--the snapping and cracking, the harsh crunching of wood on wood. .

Surely that couldn't be her tree? She stopped where she was, on the open grass, the wind blowing in her face, cloud shadows flying past her, the tall grass whipping her thighs.She looked at the canopy of the grove, the trunk groaning, the branches snapping, the trunks of the tall green trees snapping like dead sticks and falling slowly to the ground, and then the canopy itself - so familiar to her - Tilt, tilt, and slowly start to fall. Every fiber in the trunk, bark, and roots seemed to cry out in protest of the murder, but it fell and fell, and the whole tree burst from the grove; Before, it seemed to be leaning towards Marie; the huge trunk bounced upward and finally settled down with a groan of splintered wood.

She ran up to touch the swaying leaves, where her rope was still there, and her platform was a heap of torn ruins.Her heart pounded in pain, and she climbed among the fallen branches, stepped over the once-familiar but now unrecognizable branches and leaves, and climbed to the highest place possible to balance herself. Leaning on a branch, she took out her telescope, through which she saw two quite different movements in the sky. One is the movement of the cloud, moving across the moon in one direction, and the other is the movement of the dust stream, as if moving across it in the exact opposite direction.

Between the two, the dust flows faster and in much greater volumes, in fact, the whole sky seems to flow with it, a relentless torrent of dust pouring from worlds, from all worlds, into endless nothingness. Slowly, as if a series of things were automatically moving in her mind, they were connected together. Will and Lyra had said that wonderful knife was at least three hundred years old, and the old man in the Tower had told them so. Murfa had told her that the Slavs who had nourished their lives and their world for three thousand and three hundred years began to wane more than three hundred years ago.

According to Will, Seiko Knife's owner, the Angel Tower's Philosophers' Guild, had been careless and hadn't shut every window they had open.Well, Mary found one, and there must be many others. If the dust was like this, bit by bit, leaking out of the natural wound that that fine knife had made... she felt dizzy, it wasn't because of the swaying and heaving of the branch she was nesting in.She put the binoculars carefully in her pocket, hooked her arms around the branches in front of her, and gazed at the sky, the moon, and the clouds that passed by. That Seiko knife was responsible for those small leaks, the leaks were damaging, the universe was suffering for it, and she had to talk to Will and Lyra to find a way to stop it.

But this giant torrent of dust in the sky is something else entirely, new and catastrophic.If it is not stopped, all conscious life will end.Dust, as Murfa had shown her, was created when the creature was aware of itself, but some feedback system was needed to reinforce it, to make it safe, just as Murfa had the wheels and the oil from the trees.Without something like this, it would all be gone, thoughts, creativity, and feelings would wither and pass away, leaving only a dull instinctive action, and that fleeting period of life with self-awareness would be as bright as in every world Extinguish like a burning candle.

Mary felt its burden so intensely that it seemed to be aging, eighty years old, exhausted, longing for death. With a heavy heart, she crawled out from among the branches of the fallen giant tree, and set off back to the village against the strong wind that was still blowing leaves, grass, and hair. At the top of the slope, she took one last look at the dust stream, clouds and wind still blowing across it, the moon standing firmly in the middle. Then at last she saw what they were doing: she understood their grand and urgent purpose. They are trying to hold back the torrent of dust, they are trying to put some barriers against that terrible torrent: the wind, the moon, the clouds, the leaves and the grass, all the lovely things are crying out, throwing themselves into the shadow particles that make them so dear The battle to stay in this universe.

Matter loves dust, it doesn't want to see it go, that's what this night is about, that's what Mary is about. Did she ever think that life without God would have no meaning, no purpose?Yes, she thought so. "Well, now there is," she said loudly, and then again, even louder: "Now there is!" coming. She stopped, staring intently, that couldn't be the Torapi, because they always move in packs, and this one was alone, but it was exactly like them—sail-like wings, long neck— It was a torapi, yes.She had never heard of them acting alone, and she was about to run down to call the police in the village, but hesitated because it somehow stopped, floating in the water next to the trail. It's splitting... no, something's coming off its back. It was a man. She could see him quite clearly, even at that distance, the moonlight was bright, and her eyes had adjusted, and she looked through the telescope, and she was sure: it was the figure of a man, scattered with dust. . He carried something: something in the shape of a long stick, and he came swiftly along the path with light steps, not running, but moving with the swiftness of an athlete or a hunter; He concealed himself very well in the night, but through the binoculars, he seemed to be in the spotlight as if he was in the spotlight. As he got closer to the village, she realized what the stick was: he was holding a rifle. She felt as if someone had poured ice water on her heart, and every hair on her body stood on end. She was too far away to do anything: even if she shouted, he would not hear her, and she could only watch him stride into the village, looking left and right, pausing now and then to listen, going from house to house. Mary's heart, as if trying to hold the dusty moon and cloud, was crying silently: Don't go under the tree - stay away from the tree - but he came closer and closer to the tree and finally stopped at her In front of my own room.It was too much for her, she put the binoculars in her pocket and started running down the hill, she was about to yell, anything, a wild yell, but she realized just in time that the yelling might wake Will or Lyra, Making them expose themselves, she endured it again. Then, in order to continue to observe the man's whereabouts, she stopped, fumbled for the telescope again, stood still and looked through it. He is opening her door.He went in.He disappeared from sight, and the dust behind him stirred like smoke passed through by a hand.Mary waited what seemed an eternity for him to appear again. He stood in her foyer and looked around slowly from left to right, his eyes flicking over the tree. Then he stepped over the threshold and stood there quietly, as if bewildered, and Mary suddenly realized how exposed she was standing on the bare hillside, and could easily hit her with a single shot, but he only The village is interested.After another minute or two, he turned and walked away quietly. She watched him walk step by step on the path by the river, and clearly saw him get on the bird's back and sit with his legs crossed; the bird turned and swam away.Five minutes later they were out of sight.