Ohe mulefa began to build the platform for Mary, they worked quickly and well. She enjoyed watg them, because they could discuss without quarreling and cooperate without getting in each others way, and because their teiques of splitting and cutting and joining wood were so elegant and effective.
Within two days the observation platform was designed and built and lifted into place. It was firm and spacious and fortable, and when she had climbed up to it, she was as happy, in one way, as she had ever been. That one way hysically. In the dense green of the opy, with the rich blue of the sky between the leaves; with a breeze keeping her skin cool, and the faint st of the flowers delighting her whenever she se; with the rustle of the leaves, the song of the hundreds of birds, and the distant murmur of the waves on the seashore, all her senses were lulled and nurtured, and if she could have stopped thinking, she would have beeirely lapped in bliss.
But of course thinking was what she was there for.
And when she looked through her spyglass and saw the relentless outward drift of the sraf, the shadow particles, it seemed to her as if happiness and life and hope were drifting away with them. She could find no explanation at all.
Three hundred years, the mulefa had said: that was how long the trees had been failing. Given that the shadow particles passed through all the worlds alike, presumably the same thing was happening in her universe, too, and in every other ohree hundred years ago, the Royal Society was set up: the first true stific society in her world. on was making his discoveries about optid gravitation.
Three hundred years ago in Lyras world, someone ied the alethiometer.
At the same time in that strange world through which shed e to get here, the subtle knife was ied.
She lay ba the planks, feeling the platform move in a very slight, very slow rhythm as the great tree swayed in the sea breeze. Holding the spyglass to her eye, she watched the myriad tiny sparkles drift through the leaves, past the open mouths of the blossoms, through the massive boughs, moving against the wind, in a slow, deliberate current that looked all but scious.
What had happehree hundred years ago? Was it the cause of the Dust current, or was it the other way around? Or were they both the results of a different cause altogether? Or were they simply not ected at all?
The drift was mesmerizing. How easy it would be to fall into a trance, a her mind drift away with the floating particles...
Before she knew what she was doing, and because her body was lulled, that was exactly what happened. She suddenly snapped awake to find herself outside her body, and she panicked.
She was a little way above the platform, and a few feet off among the branches. And something had happeo the Dust wind: instead of that slow drift, it was rag like a river in flood. Had it sped up, or was time moving differently for her, now that she was outside her body? Either way she was scious of the most horrible danger, because the flood was threatening to sweep her loose pletely, and it was immense.
She flung out her arms to seize hold of anything solid, but she had no arms. Nothing ected. Now she was almost over that abominable drop, and her body was farther and farther from reach, sleeping so hoggishly below her. She tried to shout and wake herself up: not a sound. The body slumbered on, and the self that observed was