Work Text:
No way back?
St. Sophia's, Lyra thought as she looked out of the window of her small study, was not like the boarding school she'd so recently left. It was, of course, bigger and grander – it had predated the school by a long time, after all. There was the matter of the company: the girls she'd gone to school with had by no means all intended Oxford as the end-point of their schooling, and some of them had been full of superficial notions of marriage and children. Such ambitions weren't unknown among her fellow students, but there was a lot less talk of it and such talk was only incidental.
She shifted her nightgown where it had caught under one leg as she sat down, picked up the book in front of her and tried hard to concentrate on it. Though it was summer, daylight was already tending towards dusk and the anbaric glow from the lamp on her desk was welcome. Pantalaimon rested comfortably on her bed – he had become quite familiar with her long periods of study, and knew better than to disturb her. She might bounce an idea or a question off him if she was working at a definite assignment of some sort, but she'd found that she absorbed information better if she read quietly. She sighed, brushed loose strands of hair back from her forehead and tried not to think of who she really wanted beside her. Will was older, smarter in some ways (he'd had an education instead of wasting his childhood running rampant around Jordan College like she had), and his origins from outside her world gave him a different take on things. He'd know how to sort this problem out. His world was stronger in sciences and mathematics in many ways, even if that was no reflection on hers.
Not for the first time, she resented the fact that she couldn't study alethiometry exclusively, but Dame Hannah had said that that couldn't be the be-all and end-all – one had to have a broader education. Pan picked up on this thought. "Why on earth did you choose something so difficult?" "Science?" Lyra replied. "Anbarics and all that? Oh surely, Pan, you know the reason." "Will Parry, if I'm not mistaken. You want to find a way back to his world." "I wouldn't refuse it if it were offered me," Lyra admitted. "Except... not by cutting windows, I couldn't accept that. But if there were a way..." She shut the book – she was well ahead in her reading anyway, and it could wait. "It's not just Will, though – it's his world. Mary Malone and her Cave and all the instruments she had, remember? Ways of talking to Shadows. Ways of communicating with Dust. And if Dust – if Shadows span the universes, maybe they can carry messages between." But Mary Malone's systems had been hideously complicated: unintelligible to her even now, let alone then, and perhaps even to many Scholars – though she suspected her father might have been able to make sense of them. "And even if I can't be with Will, maybe..." She was with him in her dreams, of course, almost every night – and in her thoughts between. She wondered what dreams he had of her.
"You yourself told him to move on," Pan cautioned her. He wanted Kirjava as badly as she wanted Will, but que sera sera.
"Except I can't," Lyra said. "I've thought of it for the last six years, Pan, and I can't. Between our world's knowledge and his, there has to be a way back. A safe one. Or a way to communicate." She thought about what that angel had said – that there were ways between the worlds, and that one could learn to use them through imagination. Through alethiometry, perhaps? Through the anbaric methods Mary Malone had discovered? Through some other, accessible to her world's science? Was Will working in a similar vein?
She retrieved the rucksack and took the alethiometer out. The 'occasional lessons' Dame Hannah Relf had given her over the years had enabled her to get simple answers out of the thing, if only on a yes-no basis, provided one asked a simple enough question. Well, this was a simple enough question; wasn't it? She spun the dials, trying to guess which three symbols might be most relevant. The frustration of knowing she had once been able to do this without trying consumed her, as well as the irony that this was the one question she'd never needed to ask until she'd lost the ability. Well, she had some ability back – just a bit – and sometimes she even had occasional flashes of knowing which symbols to use, even if their interpretation was usually beyond her.
She knew she'd asked a meaningful question of some sort, though, when the fourth needle began moving. She held the symbols it showed her, the quivering, the sequence, in her head as long as she could, then put the alethiometer down and scrawled it all out before she forgot. And there it was. She had her answer. Now she only had to work out what it meant... and hope that she'd asked the right question. But that was a job for tomorrow, when her mind was fresh and the library was open again. So Pan said, and so she agreed.
"There's one thing that does give me hope," she said to him as she slipped into bed and turned out the light.
"What's that?"
"It's a complex answer, and I can't even begin to understand all of it, but I can determine one thing: the essence of that answer isn't 'no'."