Hermann awoke troubled by a dream that vanished before he could look it in the eye. Like most mornings, fog filled the forest. It was so thick they could see neither the ground below nor the leaves above. It was like their raft was floating inside a cloud.
Then like the sun breaking through, Hermann remembered. The pressure on his stomach was not his arm; it was Newton’s. He shifted carefully. The naturalist was curled towards Hermann, his head just touching Hermann's side and his arm thrown over Hermann's stomach, like a koala holding a tree.
For a peaceful moment Hermann watched Newton’s hand rise and fall with the movement of his own breathing. Did koalas exist in his world? Maybe they were sentient like the polar bears. He looked down at Newton's face. Hermann had seen the naturalist asleep before, but he was always disarmed by the sight. Newton with his little frown and without his glasses. He looked so young.
He snuffled in his sleep, and suddenly Hermann felt like a voyeur. They had not yet been together long enough for habituation, for a physical rapport. Newton’s body still belonged to him, and Hermann’s to himself. It felt strange to touch him now. For a moment, watching, Hermann had felt a tender anticipation of building this rapport; but now it seemed impossible, and he wished the rapport already existed or never would.
Everything was going to change, Hermann thought with sudden panic.
As if he could sense it, Newt opened his eyes. Near his feet, Fern raised his head and yawned.
“Morning,” Newt said, without looking up at Hermann or removing his arm.
“Good morning,” said Hermann, voice hoarse.
“Sleep well?”
“Fine,” said Hermann, without considering the true answer or whether Newton would want it. He was thinking about Newton’s arm and how sore he was and how he wanted to get up and stretch and maybe be alone.
Newt must have heard some of that in his voice, for he looked up. His eyes met Hermann’s blurrily.
“I should have known you wouldn’t be a mushy morning person,” Newt said. “Where are my glasses? I can’t see shit.”
“Above your head. Ten o’clock.”
Newton reached for them, freeing Hermann at last. He was out of his sleeping bag before Newton had finished putting his glasses on.
They collected their things without much conversation or contact. This began to concern Newt. He and Fern went down first, strapping into the harness and lowering themselves slowly with the pulleys. On the forest floor, the mist was beginning to clear, but it still hid the platform above.
They waited for Hermann.
“Does he seem okay?” Newt said.
“Hermann?” said Fernweh.
“Yeah.” Newt made a face. “I felt like he was being a little short.”
“Don’t know. But if you’re picking up on something, it’s probably there,” Fern said. “You know him well.”
“Yeah, I do.” He glanced at his dæmon. “You do too.”
Fern made a noncommittal sound. “I’d know him better if I could see his dæmon.”
“I guess,” said Newt. They both gazed up, waiting for Hermann to emerge from the cloud.
“You know what’s strange?” said Fern. “Last night, I almost thought I saw them. His dæmon.”
“What? When?”
“When you were kissing. Just for a second.”
“What did it—she?—look like.”
“All I saw was wings.”
Newt looked away, feeling awed by this.
Fern looked upwards.
“Wouldn’t have thought of him as someone flighty,” Newt said at last.
“Birds don’t mean flighty. Depends on the bird, anyway. It could have been an owl.”
“Oh, that would be a good one,” said Newt, grinning. “I don’t know though. I thought of him as someone more... steady.”
“True,” said Fern. “You know, that may be what he’s fretting about. Change. I don’t think he likes change.”
“But nothing has changed.”
Fern looked at his human. “Newt.”
“What?”
“So, we kiss now, big deal. We’re still the same people.”
“Things have changed. And will keep changing. You shouldn’t act like it’s not a big deal.”
“So change is bad even if it's change for the better?”
“I only say Hermann doesn’t like change because I don’t like change,” said Fern. “Sometimes, yes, even change for the better.”
The dark shape of Hermann materialized some twenty feet overhead. They watched him descend.
“I wish things could keep being easy,” Newt murmured. “I wish they could just stay the same.”
“Nothing is ever the same,” Fern said as Hermann touched ground. He bounded forward to greet him.
“Grüß Gott, Fernweh,” Hermann said, sounding fond. He always seemed to react most warmly to Fern when he acted most like a dog. Fern snuffled around his pack as he undid himself from the harness.
Newt was thinking about what his dæmon had said, and so kept quiet, giving Hermann space. He wasn’t going to overthink this, actually. He was going to handle it with his killer instinct, and he was going to handle it beautifully. His killer instinct for relationships? For being the world’s—scratch that, the multiverse’s—most attentive boyfriend? No, not that, although yes, that. But most of all, his killer instinct for Hermann’s moods. So what if he tended to ignore the data and say whatever he felt like? That didn’t mean he wasn’t receiving the data. He was always receiving it.
So when Hermann had his pack on and gave Newt his ‘Ready’ eyebrow raise, Newt nodded, stepped over, and held out his hand. Hermann took it, and gently tugged the bandage off his forearm. He looked at his bite.
It must have looked okay, because he nodded. He tucked the end back into the bandage. Before Hermann could drop Newt’s hand, Newt took his. He didn’t have a plan. It just seemed like the thing to do. The look on Hermann’s face told him he was right.
They walked in silence across the un-silent prairie. They both thought of the morning before. Everything looks different, thought Newt with delight. Everything looks the same, thought Hermann with confusion, for he felt it should not.
“Kind of convenient, don't you think,” said Newt lightly, “That you broke my left arm and you use your cane with your right arm?”
“What are you suggesting?” said Hermann. “That I had a long-term plan involving holding hands with you?”
“No, not that,” said Newt. “I just think I'm starting to come around to your destiny theory.”
Hermann tried to drop his hand.
“No! I'm joking, Hermann, I'm sorry.”
Hermann gave him a familiar deadly look. Newt smiled. He was in the clear.
“Come on. As if I would ever agree with any of your theories.”
“None of my theories involve angels and magic,” Hermann said disdainfully.
“It is true though, that there's a lot about us that could have clashed horribly.”
“You say that as if we have not clashed, in almost every respect.”
“You're such a pessimist,” said Newt. “Look how much we've accomplished by working together!”
“In my view we have accomplished those things despite our differences,” Hermann said.
“I'll try not to take that as an insult,” Newt said good naturedly. They had almost reached town.
“Don't try,” said Hermann.
“Don't try to—” began Newt, but suddenly he felt a spark of Fern’s intrigue. He had scented something on the air. The coyote dove ahead, veering to the left, away from town. He started barking. Newt and Hermann both looked where his nose pointed. Two small human figures, not quite full-grown, were making their way down the slope towards the town.
Hermann gripped Newt’s hand. “It’s them.”
The kids had spotted them and Lyra was waving uncertainly. The two pairs approached each other until Lyra recognized Hermann and cried out.
“Dr. Gottlieb!”
She rushed forward and wrapped him in a fierce, unexpected hug.
“Hello, Lyra,” he said, surprised.
She stepped back, beaming, and with his hands on her shoulders he looked at her. Lyra looked older. She was clean, but worn down. He’d never seen a child with such tired eyes.
Hermann found himself surprisingly affected by her presence. They had met so briefly; yet everything he had done came back to her. Maybe, if the angels were to be believed, everything in his whole life. Looking at her, this beaming, exhausted, resilient child, he felt that was worth it. His fear that her arrival would signal the end of something vanished completely. Instead he felt that something was about to begin.
“I believe you know my colleague,” he said finally, and she looked at Newton for the first time.
“My God,” she said. “The Nutty Naturalist!”
Hermann actually laughed. Newt rolled his eyes, but he was grinning. “Come here, kiddo,” he said, and she gave him a hug too. “See?” mouthed Newt to Hermann, over her shoulder. “Not even worth it.” Hermann only smirked.
“What on earth are you doing here?” she asked.
“Nothing on earth,” he said. “We have got quite a world to show you kids. Are you going to introduce your friend?”
Will had been hanging back hesitantly. The boy was around thirteen, the same age as Lyra, and had the same look of utter exhaustion. But Hermann could see he was not trusting and open like his companion. There was something more worldly about his eyes, something harder.
It was that hardness that made Hermann, against his usual impulses, pull the strange boy into a hug.
“Good to meet you, Will,” Hermann said over his shoulder.
Will, pulled into a hug by Lyra’s Scholar, stood stiff for a moment. But it had been so long since an adult, let alone a man, showed him any kind of tenderness. Will closed his eyes. He let himself be held for a moment.
It was still a stiff sort of hug, but when the professor let go, Will felt he had made a friend for life. And indeed he had.
Newt shook hands with Will, asking how he had handled Lyra’s shenanigans, and then they brought the children into town to meet the mulefa.
When everyone had gotten acquainted, they ate breakfast with Atal and a few other townsfolk. The kids met the muelfa with proper wonder, but it was clear they had seen far stranger things but lately. Whatever they had been through was still raw. It would not bear discussing so early in the day. Perhaps not even today at all. So Hermann and Newt talked about this world, explaining the interdependencies and all they had learned. Lyra liked the way the two scientists interrupted and corrected and expanded each other’s sentences. She was glad to be with familiar, but neutral faces.
In the late morning sun, the children fell asleep in the grass. Hermann and Newt went about their daily duties. In the evening, they woke the kids for dinner, and then put them up in their hut for the night. They sat outside, talking with Atal as the sun set. Where had the children been? And where were their dæmons?
Around sunset, a group of unfamiliar mulefa rode up to them. They were from a neighboring settlement. With agitation they explained that something had appeared near their town, and they needed a human.
Hermann and Atal went. They sped into the gathering night and through it, further south than Hermann had gone before. After an hour they reached it.
There were a few mulefa hovering nearby as he and Atal approached it cautiously. It looked, from here, like a window, but it was far wider than those he had seen, at least six feet long. Its other side was murky and lightless, a mauve darkness. Pouring from it were ghosts. When they saw the ghosts, they stopped. Hermann put his hand on Atal’s shoulder. She made a soft sound.
The ghosts came out in waves—for ghosts they were, surely, immaterial and translucent figures, human for the seconds they became visible—and dissolved in an instant. They stepped through the window, and in the seconds before they disappeared, they looked around themselves. At the vast prairie, the grass, the flowers, the stars. And then they vanished into it, becoming part of it. Wave after wave they came. The looks on their pale faces were of such radiant joy and relief as Hermann had never seen.
Some held together for a second or two before they vanished. One, an older woman, held together long enough to approach them. Hermann started towards her, wiping his eyes.
She reached for his hand and he held it out. Hers just passed right through. She did not seem to notice. She leaned in.
“Tell them stories...”
And then she was gone.
The next day, Hermann and Newt took Lyra and Will with them to work. They fished, and the children told their tale. It took the whole day, from morning through afternoon.
Lyra liked telling, and did most of the talking. She did not embellish as much as she might once have, for the cries of the harpies still rang in her ears. Will added when he saw fit, or when things had happened to him alone. He showed them the subtle knife, the tool that made the windows between worlds and of which he was now the bearer. The Scholars were a good audience. Dr. Gottlieb listened attentively, and the naturalist asked lots of questions, except when Will told of his father. He became quiet. She felt for him, wondering what kind of sadness it was he felt for his dead friend.
In the evening, the children went for a walk while Hermann and Newt made dinner. Hermann felt better than he had the morning before, in his moment of panic. He glanced at Newton, who was idly scratching his chin with the thumb of his bound arm, eyes obscured by the cooking fire reflected in his glasses.
“Newton,” he said.
“Mhm?”
“Have you thought about the future?” Hermann said.
Newt looked up at him. His eyes became visible, green and sharp.
“The future?”
All Hermann’s momentum vanished under Newt’s eyes. It had seemed easy to ask the question; now, Newt turned it back to him with careless ease. But Newton had never had a problem asking Hermann the hard questions.
“You know what I mean,” Herman prevaricated. “After this.”
“I guess I think about it, yeah,” said Newt. “It would be hard not to.”
“You expect to return home?”
“Yes, I think we plan to return home,” Newt said with a glance at his dæmon. “Not that we really had one, at the point when we left. I don’t know where Lyra is going, but I expect us to take her there, I suppose. After that, I don’t know.”
“What if—” Hermann hesitated, his throat becoming oddly tight— “Newton, what if you came home with me?”
“With you?” Newt’s voice spiked an octave on the last word. “To—you mean to your house? In your world? In your Oxford?”
“Obviously,” said Hermann, feeling some measure of relief at Newt’s fluster. “Yes. Obviously. I have been meaning to suggest it for some time. There are several reasons for this: first, what you have already said, that you do not have a home in your world. Second, in a broader sense, your world has been inhospitable to you, your identity, and your work. My world is more—accepting...” Even as he said it, Hermann knew Newt would be unable to conceive of what that meant. And even as he said, “You would be able to study your areas of interest without fear of censorship,” he realized Newton did not have the knowledge base of the average evolutionary biologist in his world, not even close; his world was decades behind.
Newton’s face was unreadable. “So this offer is solely for my benefit?”
“If you would let me finish,” said Hermann tersely. Newt really wasn’t going to make this easy for him, was he? “Third. We work well together. I would, personally, appreciate having you in my life, possibly for professional pursuits, and certainly for... personal pursuits.”
“‘Personal pursuits,’ eh,” Newt said with a note of mischief. “Is that what the kids call it these days?”
Hermann said nothing. He had said all he could stand to say.
“Well listen, Hermann...” Newt at last dropped his eyes. “I appreciate the offer, I really do. But I don’t think it’s that easy.”
“Why not?” Hermann said with immediate obstinacy.
“You’re right that my home is inhospitable. But it is, after all, my home. I don’t feel right leaving it.”
“But Newton—”
“Excuse me, not finished. Starting with the weakest arguments. Weakest: a vague feeling of unease. Next, slightly stronger: my work. I have no career in your world. I don’t exist there. And I don’t know the things your scientists know. Christ, Hermann, I don’t even know what the disciplines are called. I still call you an ‘experimental theologian’ in my head, even though you, in your logical world, call yourself a ‘physicist.’ I don't even know what kind of scientist I would pretend to be.”
“You underestimate yourself, Newton,” said Hermann fiercely. “You are intelligent enough to learn such things. And as to your objection about your career, you are quick to forget your mentor Stan Grumman. As we learned today, he did this exact thing: he came from one world to another and built himself a scientific career. You can do the same. And you will have my help.”
“But he went the other way, Hermann,” Newt said. “He went from your more advanced world to mine. You’re not thinking about it from my position—I don’t even see my world as backwards. I know you do. But I can’t think of it like that. It’s the status quo to me. It’s my whole frame of reference. I can’t put anything you say on a scale—studying evolution? ‘Acceptance’? Of what? Being Jewish? Loving men?”
“Yes!” said Hermann, exasperated but upset. “It is not perfect, but it's much better! You are being deliberately obtuse, Newton! I know you have the imagination to conceptualize these things, and even if you haven’t, it doesn’t matter. They are still true, and you can simply come find out!”
“Of course it matters! I’m not being obtuse, Hermann, you are. You’re forgetting my last and most obvious issue, which is my dæmon.”
“...People have pets! It may be difficult to explain but—”
“Hermann, don’t be ridiculous! People don’t have mangy black coyotes as pets. There would be no way to make people understand how harmless he is.”
“We can figure something out, Newton.”
“I don’t see what! It’s not that I don’t want it. But it’s a pipe dream. You’re not being practical, man. I’m being practical, for once.”
“You are being unnecessarily pessimistic!” said Hermann angrily. “I’ve thought about these things, Newton, of course I have!” I felt the same conclusions lurking beneath, but I ignored them, he did not say. He was upset because Newton was right. “But—but—”
“You can’t come live with me,” Newton was saying. “Having no dæmon is even worse. And they’d find out about us eventually, and we’d be in trouble. I mean real trouble. I guess we could run away to New Amsterdam, but even there, it isn’t that safe...”
“So you’re saying...”
Normally, arguing with Newton was like climbing an endless staircase. Landing after landing, he never found the top. And no matter how out of breath he got, he kept on. Abruptly, Hermann found himself at the top. He did not want to finish his sentence.
So you’re saying we can’t be together.
Newton broke off too. Their eyes met. Newton looked afraid, suddenly. Perhaps he had reached the end too, the end of the painful things he would force Hermann to say. The sentence stayed unfinished.
Suddenly Newt stood.
“I think we should go,” he said.
Hermann’s stomach dropped. “Go?”
“Just for tonight. Fern and I. We’ll sleep on the platform.”
“Oh—of course.” Hermann felt deeply uneasy.
Newt stood awkwardly for a second. Fern was still sitting.
“Should we go after dinner?”
Hermann stared. “Are you asking me?”
“No,” said Newt. “No, we’ll go now.”
He stepped round the cooking fire and, bending down, kissed Hermann on the top of the head.
“See you tomorrow,” he said.
Hermann did not move as Newt went inside, got his things, and reemerged. With a silent wave, he and his dæmon left. The pressure from Newton's kiss seemed to remain, like a bruise. He sat still until the smell of their food burning broke him from his reverie. When he moved, the feeling faded from his head. It felt deeply wrong to him that Newton should go, alone, to the platform, but he did not know why. If the man needed his space, that was fine. But anxiety sat deep and heavy in the pit of his heart.
By the time they had eaten, the sun was setting. Hermann sat with Atal and the children under a tree by the whispering river, and told his story.
He began with his life before Lyra. He explained his work with the dark matter research, with Oliver, and how Lyra had turned it all upside down. He had done as she told him, he said, and made the machine speak to the Dust. They told him they were angels.
Since her and Will’s story, he and Newt knew that angels were as real as the rest. But, as the rest, it seemed too dark and fantastical to be really true. It must be, Hermann thought, but its wild truths had not yet sunk into the rational parts of his brain.
He did not say, of course, to Lyra, that he did not ‘believe’ her story, for that was not quite true. He accepted it as a conditional truth, like a theory that could not be proven, but had to be accepted in order to conceptualize other sorts of progress.
Oddly enough it was Will who sensed his reticence. “Angels?” he said. “And you believed them, even though you were a scientist?”
“It’s difficult to say,” Hermann said. He was less uncomfortable explaining this to them than he was to Newton. “I accepted that I was speaking to some unknown consciousness, a form of life that I did not understand. I found it difficult to believe that they were angels. Particularly because of my religious background.”
“What religious background?” said Will.
“Before I was a professor, I was in training to be priest,” Hermann said.
Will raised his eyebrows to Lyra. She nodded in confirmation.
“Why did you quit?” Will asked.
“A number of reasons,” Hermann said, which was true.
Tell them stories.
“Perhaps you need to understand first why I thought it right to become a priest in the first place.”
The children nodded.
“My father was very devout,” he explained. “It was always his wish. I think he wanted me to become an important leader in the church, so that he could wield some of this power by proxy. Why he thought I had the disposition for that... type of role.... I never understood. But he was always a father to that concept of me, and never to my actual self. He remained so until I left the church; perhaps he remains so to this day. He has not spoken to me since I left it.
“Of course, I had personal reasons for religious devotion. I think that a drive towards higher truth was one. I went to university, studied physics, and then began divinity school in conjunction with my masters. It did not take long to see that the internal workings of the church organization were not in pursuit of any higher truth. They were in pursuit of power, like my father, and they used it to intimidate and coerce and steal.
“In my scientific studies, there was stability. With my rational mind, I understood that physics was better than religion, for me. But it took a long time for me to understand that with my emotions. By that time, religion had rotted in me. Confusion turned to mistrust and disgust.”
“What was it that made you understand, emotionally?” Lyra asked. “When did you finally leave?”
“I remember the moment exactly,” Hermann said, his voice growing steadier as he stepped into the current of his story. “I went to a conference. A physics conference. It was in Italy, on the coast. I come from a cold place, so I have always loved warm beaches and sea air... It was the evening, after a long day of vigorous discussion, and I was out at dinner with some colleagues and new acquaintances. We sat on a terrace under the stars, among candles and vines with some sort of fragrant flower, and a quartet was playing.
“You see, I chose the course of priesthood when I was very young. Too young to have ever fallen in love. I always told myself that love was another country—many people visited, and maybe they saw interesting or beautiful things there. But I did not need to visit. There were equally interesting things to be discovered at home.
“On this night, however, I found myself charmed by one of our new acquaintances. He was a scientist from Argentina, and he was a warm and genuine and clever man. As I conversed with him, I started to see over the border into that other country. And slowly, perhaps with the onset of the wine, I started to think how many ways I had been fooling myself. That I was all right, just fine, being always alone. That I was all right, just fine, living for people who would excommunicate me if they knew I could fall in love with this man. That I was all right, that I believed in what I was doing. Then I heard the music.
“The quartet was playing Tchaikovsky. Romeo and Juliet. I hadn’t heard the piece in a decade. But suddenly I remembered. I was thirteen, I was at a church piano recital. A boy my age played an arrangement of Romeo and Juliet and I had been very taken with it. Downstairs, in the after-recital social, I approached him and told him how much I had admired his playing. He brought me excitedly back up to the piano and showed me the sheet music—he had a duet version. Could I sight read well enough, he asked? Would I try? I said I would. We played. It was halting and imperfect, but the tune carried through. There was one phrase in particular that gave me difficulty. I could not get the fingering quite right. The boy said here and took my hand, and guided my fingers to the right keys. I fell in love in an instant, just for the gentle way he guided me.”
Unnoticed by Hermann, Lyra was sitting forward. She hugged her knees and sat very still. Inside her, great chords were striking.
“We finished the piece together. Our music teacher had come in, and said we played well as a duet. So for a few weeks, we practiced together. It was in the second, or perhaps the third practice that we kissed. We were both so frightened and shy that it seemed impossible, it seemed neither of us would move. But then we did. We kissed, and everything was...”
Hermann faltered. His memory was so vivid but distant, like a movie he had once watched. He was not a storyteller, really; he did not know how to turn such powerful emotions into words for them.
“...It was another country. Or maybe it was paradise. But sitting there on the terrace, smiling at the man from Argentina, with Romeo and Juliet filling the air, I remembered suddenly that I had been there. I had been to that country. And the question became urgent. More important even than god or physics. Would I ever go again? After all, what could be more important?” He murmured, “What could be.”
His eyes roamed the top of the tree under which they sat, watching the dark, trembling silhouettes of leaves. Lyra watched him.
“So I left the church.”
“Did you see him again?” Lyra asked.
“Yes,” said Herman. “A few times. And for a time, during my doctorate, I lived with someone—Martin was his name—who I met at Oxford.”
“You were in love?”
“Yes,” said Hermann. “For a time. But now I live alone.”
“Not now,” said Lyra. “You live with the naturalist.”
Hermann frowned at her sadly, because suddenly he had to stop himself from crying.
“For now, yes,” he said, quietly. “You’re right. But only while we’re here. And we don’t know how long that will be.”
In the dim nighttime light, Lyra’s eyes searched his. She looked at him as if he had told her something important, far more important than all the fabulous and terrifying truths she had told him. And maybe he had.
⁂
Hermann could not sleep. He was alone on his narrow bed in the hut, the children were sleeping under the tree by the river and Newton was in the canopy. He tossed and turned. But it was not pain, not his hip, not even his internal conflict about Newton, keeping him awake. What possessed him was inaccessible but unignorable, no more substantial than a forgotten dream and no less urgent.
Finally he got up. He took his cane and binoculars and stalked outside. The moon was high and bright as a searchlight. It lit a world wild with wind. Hermann walked fast, out of town, out into the prairie. The grass roiled around him like a storm-tossed sea. Above, clouds raced across the sky like a school of fleeing fish. He could see the grove a half mile off, heaving and swaying. Somewhere in there, Newton was sleeping.
Why? Why? Hermann felt like he was sleepwalking, yet like he had never been more alive. He felt like the whole planet, the whole universe, maybe every universe, was crying out. Why? The question that steered his life. He raised the binoculars and squinted up at the sky. There was the dreaded upper current of Dust—but it was no current now. It was a torrent. It rushed across the sky the way water plunges off the edge of a waterfall, away from their world, away from their minds, away from the trees and the seeds and the people and all that the Dust made good. From all the matter in all the universes to which it had given self-awareness, it fled.
But matter did not give up. The clouds, the wind, the trees, everything was rushing to push it back. Hermann could see, through his binoculars. They were no more than twigs damming a flood, but how could they know that? Matter loved Dust. It would keep trying and trying until the last speck of Dust trickled away.
And so too did Hermann. And so too would Hermann. Was he not matter? And Dust as well?
“Don’t go!” he shouted to the wild sky. Nothing but a twig against the flood. “Stop! Don’t go!” He was one of the clouds, wishing to stop the unstoppable. And he would not give up, not until he shouted himself hoarse.
Hermann was wrong about one thing. Newt was not sleeping. He was wide awake, lying on his back in the center of the raft. All night it pitched and tossed like a real raft in a real storm. He gripped Fern. They were not afraid, exactly, but they could feel the fire, the desperate aliveness of the world.
Fernweh kept wondering if a tree would be blown down. Their tree. Newt heard his thoughts and pinged back that it would not. But they did not speak. Silently they witnessed the torrent above.
At last the wind began to die down as the moon began to sink. Newt thought he might be able to sleep. He rose slowly, testing the stability of his raft like someone leaving their basement after a tornado to assess the damage. He pressed with his feet, shifting, feeling its normal, slight give. Fern stretched and padded to the edge of the raft.
It was an unusually clear night, and the moon was bright on the water. On the sea breeze, Fern smelled something unusual. Newt followed Fern to the edge and squinted out towards the shore. It was a few hundred yards away, so they could only see crannies of ocean through the branches and trunks. The shimmering moonlight moved strangely. Newt reached for the binoculars, then remembered Hermann had them. No, that was not moonlight. It looked like sailboats.
With a shared chill, Newt and Fern realized they were seeing the tualapi. There were three in a triangle formation. Through the branches they watched the sails reach the shore. But they did not land; a tiny shape emerged from one of them like a bug. It went to shore, and the birds turned and sailed away as fast as they had come.
The bug shape was so distant and contextually wrong that Newt did not recognize it at first. But it walked towards the trees, getting closer, and he realized it was a man. It was too far to see any distinguishing features, but a great foreboding filled him. He reached for Fern.
They watched the man walk inland. He moved between the avenues of moonlight, staying in the shadows. He headed vaguely north, away from town. He did not come close enough to see their ropes and pulleys. Newt and Fern watched him until he vanished among the trees.
The next day, the third day of Lyra and Will’s stay, they decided it was time at last to search for their dæmons. Hermann was anxious to let them wander, and fussed over their provisions before finally seeing them off. They promised to be back before dark. He went about his daily work, thinking about the kids and about Newton, who had yet to return. Hermann could not stop thinking about the windstorm, picturing it knocking their tree down, smashing their platform to splinters. Newton and his dæmon wouldn’t stand a chance.
These violent visions were so persistent and specific that Hermann started to think he had dreamed them and forgotten. But before he could panic about premonitions, Newton and Fernweh returned.
Newt explained they had not fallen asleep until the early morning, and so not woken until noon. On the way back, they had spotted the children from a distance. “We waved,” Newt said, “But they seemed pretty absorbed in each other.”
Without another word Hermann pulled Newton into a hug. Newt held onto him with his good arm, his broken one squeezed between them. Hermann had never hugged him before. He hugged tight. Newt’s broken arm was pressed so hard against Hermann’s chest that he felt his heart thumping. What an anxious mess Hermann was, Newt thought, not without fondness. Then for no reason he felt like crying. He tightened his arm around Hermann’s shoulders and buried his face in Hermann’s neck. Now Newt felt his heartbeat there too. He let Hermann’s pulse and breath take over his senses until the sadness ebbed back into the nothingness whence it came.
Their afternoon passed quietly. The silent embrace seemed to have marked a change, or maybe the air had changed. Maybe this season, the sunshine season, was finally ending. Or maybe another storm was coming, and this was the calm before it.
But the evening brought no storm. It brought the two kids, hand in hand, over the rise.
Newt saw them first and nudged Hermann. He looked, and knew at once what had happened, and that his story had been the last push towards it. The two held hands, leaned in close together, walked like it mattered not one whit where.
Newton was urgently tapping his chest with the back of his hand. “Hermann. Hermann. The binoculars.”
In a slow trance, Hermann handed them over. Newton looked.
“Good God...”
He passed the binoculars to Hermann. The physicist already knew what he would see.
Dust.
It was falling.
He magnified, searching for the great current. But it was gone. The air above the prairie was filled with a glittering flurry of Dust, falling down to earth again, falling as thick as snow. And it swirled thickest and brightest around the two of them, blissfully in love in the afternoon sun.
After dinner, Lyra and Will slept under the tree again. Hermann and Newt cleaned up dinner, and when Hermann turned around, Newt was collecting his things from his side of the hut.
“Don’t go,” Hermann said without thinking.
Newt looked up.
“Are you going to the platform?” Hermann asked.
Newt nodded.
“Don’t,” said Hermann in a low voice.
“Why not?” said Newt, just as quietly.
Because the assassin is out there, Hermann thought. Because I’m afraid our tree will fall. Because I want you to stay. Because I’m afraid. Because I want you to stay.
“Just stay,” said Hermann. His voice was barely more than a whisper.
Newt moved towards him.
“Just... please,” Hermann said.
“All right,” said Newt, reaching him. His hand was slipping around Hermann’s waist. “All right, Hermann.”
Newt kissed him. He moved slowly and Hermann responded slowly, but he moved with intent. He tipped his chin forward and pressed into Hermann, then drew him back again in a shallow arc. Hermann lifted his hand to Newt’s cheek with a tremor.
“Don’t go,” Hermann whispered again when Newt pulled away.
“All right,” Newt murmured, and kissed him again.
“Don’t go back without me,” said Hermann.
“I won’t.”
“I mean—I mean home.”
“I know. I won’t. I’m going with you.”
Hermann’s other hand stopped its northward progress up his spine. “You’re what?”
“You heard me,” Newt said, not stopping any progress. Hermann was stock-still so Newt kissed under his jaw and down his neck. “I said—I'm going to come with you. You’ll never—get rid of me—”
Before Newt knew it, he'd been spun around and pinned to the wall and Hermann’s mouth was on his and his breath was gone, his breath was Hermann’s. The man kissed him like it was an urgent message he had to deliver—not with desperation, but with a single-minded thoroughness and just a hint of hopeless devotion. Newt had expected nothing less.
In due time, Hermann moved them to the tiny bed and divested them of their clothes with the same passionate expeditiousness. Sleeping with Hermann reminded Newt in some undefinable way of flying across the tundra. In his arms there was some quality of the icy reach, perhaps of its adventure, its harsh freedom. But there was also a safety and belonging that he had rarely felt in bed. In this security lay a path to discovery, a mystery to be solved and deepened and solved again. In that way, perhaps Hermann more embodied the world of the mulefa.
Newt made love to him with no thought to the future. There were moments where a puff of air seemed to come from nowhere, or a sound like fluttering wings, and Fern thought for sure he saw the dæmon close overhead. And when it was over, they slept on blankets on the floor, where there was enough space to sleep without crowding each other. Hermann lay on his back and Newt lay on his stomach, curled towards his partner, their heads close and their arms tangled together.
The Dust was fixed by Lyra and Will, but not soon enough to save every wheel-pod tree. That night in the wind-tossed grove by the sea, one last tree fell. Perhaps it had been sick for too long; or perhaps the Dust itself had ideas. The tree’s death was unseen. Hermann Gottlieb did not see it fall. Nor did Newton Gieszler or Fernweh, because they had stayed at home safely. And it was not seen by Father Gomez or his dæmon, sleeping lightly among the roots nearby. They were woken by the great rumble and crack, loud as thunder. But by that time it was too late. They were crushed by a dark tower before they knew what it was.
The beetle daemon of the assassin Father Gomez vanished into nothing. The body of the assassin Father Gomez was never found or searched for. One day, all that would be left was the metal rifle and the little gold ring with the cross, rusting away among the ropes and splinters of the scientists’ platform.
Lyra and Will did not search for their dæmons the next day, though they knew the dæmons were close by. Instead they helped the mulefa with Geiszler and Gottlieb, and the simple, satisfying repetition balanced and belied the turmoil of the love growing between them.
There was also the love between the two scientists. It intrigued Lyra. When Dr. Gottlieb told his story, she had not asked, just accepted. Men were not with men, where she came from. Where he and Will came from, perhaps they were. When she asked Will, he said yes, in their world, sometimes men were with men and women were with women. But the naturalist was from where she was from, and she felt sure he was with Dr. Gottlieb. So perhaps it was something in her own world too, of which she did not know. Then she remembered that Geiszler’s dæmon was a male, and that many other Jordan Scholars had mistrusted him for that. She had never questioned why. So this, then, was why?
But Will said he was not certain they were together. Lyra was certain. She hadn’t been quite sure, until this afternoon. They had been hunting for mussels in the low tide, and the naturalist had broken his glasses. He bent over and they fell onto a rock, and when he picked them up, the arm was detached. Dr. Gottlieb took the pieces from him. “Don't worry,” he said.
The four humans had returned to the hut, half-blind Newt holding Dr. Gottlieb’s arm for guidance. Dr. Gottlieb dug through his pack and pulled out a tiny clear tube. A glasses repair kit, he said. He sat at their little table and, putting on his own glasses, set about fixing Newt’s. Lyra had watched. She was strangely fascinated. In the hut all was still except for Hermann’s careful, precise motions. There was something tender about the way he fixed his glasses. Lyra could not have said what. Or maybe it was the way Newt looked at him when he had put them back on and blinked back into the world. But when it was done, she knew they were together.
They spent another day looking for their dæmons, but without success. Lyra wanted to know if they were on the right course, so she consulted the alethiometer.
She found she had some difficulty reading it. In her trance, it took many more repetitions than usual to read what the needle was saying. And when she did, she was not confident she had got all that it was implying. It told her that her friend the witch Serafina Pekkala was coming to escort them home. The journey was long; she would arrive in seven days. The alethiometer was giving Lyra another message too. It involved time and home, but she could not parse it. She sat for too long trying, becoming frustrated, and then the message stopped and she had to give up.
A week. A week for Lyra and Will to find their dæmons, a week before all four humans left the world of the mulefa. Hermann found Newton and Fern hunting mussels in the sandbar. Fern was low to the ground, sniffing them out, and Newt followed, whistling as he dug where his dæmon pointed.
“A week,” Newt repeated when Hermann told him. “Well, all right then. I’m sure the witch has a plan.”
“Do you know her?” Hermann asked.
“No, but I’ve known witches,” Newt said. “Tricky ladies. I like them. They tend to like me too. They’re very strange.”
“That explains it, then,” Hermann said, as Newt went back to digging and whistling.
“Ha, ha,” Newt said, pulling a mussel out.
“What’s that you’re whistling?” Hermann asked in a distant voice.
Newt whistled the tune again. “I think it's Tchaikovsky,” he said. “Why?”
“Hello?”
Fern sat up. He had been lying across the threshold of their open door. It was evening, after dinner, a few days later. The air was cool and damp. They had lit a fire. The scientists were talking by it now, probably arguing. Fern knew at once that the voice he heard was not of a human but of a dæmon. Lyra, or Will’s?
“Hello,” Fern said, looking round. He didn’t see anyone.
“Fernweh?” said a male voice, sounding greatly surprised.
“Pantalaimon?”
“Fernweh, is that really you?”
“Show yourselves,” said Fern, and two birds fluttered down from the roof.
Pan was in the shape of a tawny owl. The female dæmon, surely Will’s, was a sleek crow. Excited to see Fern, Pan transformed into a fox and bounded forward to meet him. They touched noses.
“It’s a pleasant surprise to see you again,” said Pantalaimon.
“It was always a pleasant surprise to see you, when you showed up to class,” Fern said.
Pan laughed.
“You must be Will’s dæmon,” said Fern to the crow.
“Yes,” she said, bobbing over. She turned into a tabby cat. Her green eyes watched him sharply. There was something willful in them that reminded Fern of Lyra. “My name is Kirjava.”
“Why have you come to us before returning to your humans?” said Fern.
“We have things to tell them,” Pan said. “Important but terrible things.”
“What things?” said Newt’s voice.
All three dæmons looked up. Lit by the fire, the two men looked back at them.
“Come in,” said Fern.
The dæmons came to the hearth and spoke. Newt and Hermann listened.
“Why aren’t you with your humans?” Fern asked.
The dæmons exchanged a look. In it, there was pain and love and solace; what they had to say, they did not want to say.
“We’ve been giving them time,” said Will’s dæmon Kirjava. “Before we tell them.”
“Tell us, then,” said Fern.
Pan started: “After they left us outside the world of the dead, we traveled far and wide. Wherever we found a window, we went through. We saw many strange worlds and learned many strange things.”
Newt reached for his dæmon and scratched his neck. He thought with a pang how strange it was that they could have experiences independent of their humans like that. It was a pang of homesickness, but also of curious envy. What would that be like? They would never know. The finality of that ignorance bothered him, as a scientist.
“Among many things, we learned about Dust. We met an angel.” Here, Hermann stiffened slightly beside Newt. “She told us what we already knew, in a way—the reason the Dust is flowing away.”
“But I thought the Dust current was stopped,” Hermann said. “Just a few days ago. Instead of flowing away, it began falling again.”
“Will and Lyra have repaired some of the flow, but not all,” Pan said. Newt could hear the sorrow in his voice. “The dangerous flood began 300 years ago. We didn’t know why until the angel explained. It’s because of the windows. The Dust is flowing out from the windows between worlds.”
Newt felt a terrible foreboding start to grow in the back of his lungs.
“300 years ago was when the subtle knife was forged. Every time it cuts a window, it makes a slit in the space between worlds, and Dust leaks away into the abyss.”
“Some windows get opened and closed quickly, so they only make a little Dust,” Pan said. “But others are left open. The one you came through, Newt, was a few decades old. The one Dr. Gottlieb came through was more than 200 years old.”
“The abyss is the space between worlds,” Kirjava said. “It’s a nowhere space of nothingness. That's where the Dust disappears to. And that’s where specters come from. They are like spawn of the abyss.”
“Good God,” Hermann murmured.
“That’s why the knife must be destroyed,” she said. “It can never be used again.”
“And all the windows... all the windows must be shut,” said Pan.
Newt felt something closing in him, in his chest. As if one such portal had been open in his chest, and it was being sewn shut.
Hermann, next to him, was blank. Very well, so what if they had to close the windows? They had already decided that Newton was coming to his world. So now, there would be no turning back. So what? For Hermann, there never had been any turning back.
“This is grave news indeed,” Hermann said, his voice surprisingly animated. “Lyra and Will will be upset by the harm they have inadvertently caused. If they wish...” He glanced at Newt, who met his eyes numbly. “...If they wish to stay together, they will have to decide which world.”
Pan made a keening sound. Will’s dæmon was shaking her head, looking deeply pained and a little angry. “No... they can’t.”
“The ghost of Stan Grumman spoke to us,” Pan said quietly. “He came from her world, but lived in mine.” (He meant Kirjava’s.) “For a time... before he became ill. His soul and his body wasted away. He explained to us that... people can only live for a short time outside their world. Only a few years.” Pan closed his eyes. “He made it ten.”
The dæmon spoke the last words so slowly and quietly that they seemed to come from the fire, from the shadows it sent dancing on the floor. Not from reality. Newt stared at the shadows. He was thinking of Stan. Because that was easier. He pictured Stan, his intensity, his wits, his vitality. Could he have been dying all the while? It was impossible. Could Newt live like that? In his mind his possible future became Stan’s definite past. He imagined doing it.
He could do it.
When he looked up, the dæmons had left. Hermann was closing the door. He was still numb. There must be a way. There must. He looked at Newton.
“I’m still coming,” was the first thing Newt said.
“No you are not,” said Hermann instantly.
“I don’t care. About any of it. I don’t care about getting sick. Ten years, Hermann? That’s plenty of time. Ten good years!”
“They would not be ten good years, waiting for you to start dying,” Hermann snapped. “And even so, ten years? That’s nothing! That’s the blink of an eye! We’ll be in our forties, Newton. That’s hardly even middle age. What are you picturing? We have a home together, we’ve built our careers, and then what? You’ll just start—wasting away?” His voice choked for a second as he thought of the men he had known, the gay Americans and Canadians, wasted by AIDS in the prime of their lives. “No,” he said, and his voice cracked again. “No. That would be much worse.”
“But then what?” Newt said. The cracks in Hermann’s voice were almost enough to make him start crying, and he was fighting not to.
“Then. Then. Then there must be a way around it,” Hermann said. He moved suddenly, pacing from the door to the table, where their tools were laid out neatly for inventory and packing. “We figured out the Dust together. We can find some loophole.”
“A loophole where? How could there be one?” said Newt, his voice rising. “It’s impossible, Hermann, you know it’s impossible. It’s this—my expiration date—or nothing! It would be worth it! This or nothing! I choose this!”
Hermann rounded on him.
“No, it is not this. It’s not this, it will never be this. I will not let you. Not ever. And if it’s not this, it’s nothing. It’s nothing, Newton.”
He suddenly started to cry, and his face crumpled in the most horrible way Newt could imagine. But before Newt could start towards him, Hermann’s hand shot out and he struck the table. The noise snapped the silence with a hysterical crack. He whipped around and found the binoculars on the table. He snatched them from the table and hurled them to the floor. The glass shattered. The violence of his movement shocked Newt so badly that he didn’t cry yet. Hermann leaned on the table, back to Newt, shaking.
“After all this—” he said, voice choked, “After more than thirty years—you bring us together—and after all we went through to get here—you bring us together from different worlds—and you let this happen?—You bring us together, just to use us—for some holy mission—and then when it’s done, that’s it? You let us be torn apart? That’s it?”
Hermann struck the table again, but already more weakly. Newt was crying silently. He knew who Hermann was talking to, for the first time in ten years.
And he knew if hearts could break, he was seeing Hermann’s breaking now. Newt was crushed, but it had never seemed real. It had always been, at bottom, too good to be true. But not for Hermann. Newt knew Hermann had allowed himself to believe it. For the first time, Hermann had moved happiness from the realm of fantasy into reality. Now it was torn away.
So fate had dictated.