「I dont need ahiometer for that. Now I want to hear about your journey here, Lyra. Start from the beginning. Tell me everything.」
So she did. She began with her hiding iiring Room, a on to the Gobblers taking Roger, aime with Mrs. Coulter, and everything else that had happened.
It was a long tale, and when she fi she said, 「So theres ohing I want to know, and I re Ive got the right to know it, like I had the right to know who I really was. And if you didnt tell me that, youve got to tell me this, in repense. So: whats Dust? And whys everyone so afraid of it?」
He looked at her as if trying to guess whether she would uand what he was about to say. He had never looked at her seriously before, she thought; until now he had always been like an adult indulging a child in a pretty trick. But he seemed to think she was ready.
「Dust is what makes the alethiometer work,」 he said. 「Ah...I thought it might! But what else? How did they find out about it?」
「In one way, the Church has always been aware of it. Theyve been preag about Dust for turies, only they didnt call it by that name.
「But some years ago a Muscovite called Boris Mikhailovitch Rusakov discovered a new kind of elementary particle. Youve heard of eles, photons, rinos, and the rest? Theyre called elementary particles because you t break them down any further: theres nothing ihem but themselves. Well, this new kind of particle was elementary all right, but it was very hard to measure because it did in any of the usual ways. The hardest thing for Rusakov to uand was why the new particle seemed to cluster where human beings were, as if it were attracted to us. And especially to adults. Children too, but not nearly so mutil their daemons have taken a fixed form. During the years of puberty they begin to attract Dust more strongly, and it settles on them as it settles on adults.
「Now all discoveries of this sort, because they have a bearing on the does of the Church, have to be annouhrough the Magisterium in Geneva. And this discovery of Rusakovs was so unlikely and strahat the ior from the sistorial Court of Discipline suspected Rusakov of diabolic possession. He performed an exorcism in the laboratory, he interrogated Rusakov uhe rules of the Inquisition, but finally they had to accept the fact that Rusakov wasnt lying or deceiving them: Dust really existed.
「That left them with the problem of deg what it was. And given the Churature, there was only ohing they could have chosen. The Magisterium decided that Dust was the physical evidence final sin. Do you know what inal sin is?」
She twisted her lips. It was like being back at Jordan, being quizzed on something shed been half-taught. 「Sort of,」 she said.
「No, you dont. Go to the shelf beside the desk and brihe Bible.」
Lyra did so, and hahe big black book to her father.
「You do remember the story of Adam and Eve?」
「Course,」 she said. 「She wasnt supposed to eat the fruit and the serpeed her, and she did.」
「And what happehen?」
「Umm...They were thrown out. God threw them out of the garden.」
「God had told them not to eat the fruit, because they would die. Remember, they were naked in the garden, they were like children, their daemons took on any form they desired. But this is what happened.」
He turo Chapter Three of Genesis, and read:
「And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
「But o