Work Text:
“True, that true beautie vertue is indeed.
Whereof this beautie can be but a shade,
Which, elements with mortall mixture breed.”
– Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet V
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- marisa coulter experimental theology
- Did you mean: metaphysical experimental theology
Strange. It’s strange.
Marisa Coulter is not a person that exists – at least, not within the field of experimental theology, whatever that means. How is theology connected to science? Mary still doesn’t know.
It is connected somehow, though, that much has been made clear. Angels, the voice said, so clearly, so matter-of-factly, like Mary was stupid for even asking. Like everything she was trying to get away from when she left the convent is in the very fabric of the world still, inescapable.
And now?
She slides her phone and her fruitless search for who this woman actually is back into her pocket and peers around the door of the kitchenette to look into her office. Marisa Coulter is sitting, straight-backed, in the chair in front of her desk. She doesn’t look very comfortable. Mary thinks about offering her a cushion, but then figures it would probably be denied. There’s something weirdly Puritan about the woman. Spartan, even, or perhaps more like. There’s definitely something combative in her eyes.
She turns back to the kitchenette and pours a little milk in each mug of coffee. Her hand hovers over the sugar before she thinks better of it - Mrs. Coulter hardly looks like a sugar person - and instead she just gives each coffee a stir. She picks them up, one in each hand, and is halfway out the door when suddenly Xander, a postgrad she’s usually quite fond of, is right in front of her and she starts. Coffee drips on the floor in a couple of fat circles.
“Xander, hi,” she says tiredly, and hopes to convey that she really does not have time to talk right now. She has a mess to unravel, the tangled threads of dark matter and angels and something Lyra called original sin. There’s a reason she didn’t sign up to do PhD supervisions this year, though Xander seems to have adopted her anyway.
“Hey, Mary. Listen, I was thinking about that book by–”
Looking beyond him, she sees that the chair in front of her desk is now empty. A strange sense of urgency rises up inside her - she can’t let this woman get away from her, not like Lyra did, not when there’s so much to do and discover - and she starts to move past Xander, uncaring of the coffee dripping onto the floor. “I’ll see you later, okay? We can discuss it another time.” She says this with a smile but it’s cutting nonetheless. (Maybe, on some level, she sees what her sister means about work above all, work above friends, work above fun. But it’s important. It is.)
Xander nods, cowed, and slinks off. Mary doesn’t watch him go. She goes straight through to her office and lets out a perhaps inappropriate sigh of relief when she sees that Mrs. Coulter has not, in fact, upped and left. She’s standing by the bookshelf with - of all things - the St Peter’s prospectus in her hands. Mary sets the mugs down on the desk and steps towards her, peering as unobtrusively as she can over her shoulder. She smells nice, Mary thinks absently – nice but strange, with something she can’t place.
The prospectus is open on this year’s matriculation photo, a parade of excited faces in cap and commoner’s gown. A good cohort this year, a diverse one, not that Mary has much to do with the undergraduate body. St Peter’s is good for that sort of thing, better than most of the other colleges. A high state school intake, over half of the new students women. Mrs. Coulter’s fingers skate over the image with something like–
wonder?
–in her face.
“Do you have much of a connection to Oxford, then?” Mary asks, keeping her voice light, friendly, but there’s real curiosity behind it. There’s a secret here, she knows. She’s good at unearthing secrets, nosing through the lies. That’s another reason why she and the Church could never get on for long.
Mrs. Coulter jumps about a foot in the air and snaps the prospectus shut. She looks about ready to flee when she turns to look Mary in the eyes, but clearly something changes her mind. Her shoulders stay stiff, her eyes cool and wary, but she offers a practiced smile and says, “I haven’t spent much time here, no, if that’s what you’re asking.”
She sets the prospectus down on the shelf, and then brushes past Mary to sit back down in the chair, folding her hands together in her lap. Mary swallows, flickers her gaze from Mrs. Coulter’s face to her hands and back again, and then sits down herself. “So, your work,” she begins, and clears her throat. “I’m really interested, actually. Lyra had such fascinating ideas–”
Mrs. Coulter cuts her off smoothly. “I don’t want to talk about my work.” Mary grinds to a halt and blinks at her, wrong-footed, even though she knew this was coming from the moment that Google search came up blank. “I’d much rather talk about yours.”
Mary takes a sip of her coffee and winces as it scalds her tongue. “Would you, now?” It comes out a little more adversarial than she meant it – but then maybe she did mean it. Something about Mrs. Coulter, if that’s even her name, has her on edge, spoiling for something that’s maybe not quite a fight, but not quite not one. Something in her soul is rising to meet a challenge.
Mrs. Coulter inclines her head. “I would,” she says, crossing her legs and clasping her hands over one knee. “So tell me about your dark matter. About my Dust.”
Dust. Such a strange word for it. Moralising. Christian-ising, in the extreme. For you are Dust, and to Dust you shall return. Mary never really thought there’d come a day when scripture and science would be synthesised so effectively. She’d never really thought about dark matter as a moral thing, as a wine-and-bread-of-Christ thing, as a forgive me father for I have sinned thing. Angels, the voice of Dust in her head whispers. Maybe she’s been looking at it wrong this whole time.
“There’s a lot to tell. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
Mrs. Coulter smiles, and opens her mouth to respond. But then her smile turns razor-sharp, a grimace, and her hands flex in her lap as she digs her nails into her palm. Mary frowns. There’s something she’s missed. “Are you- are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” she snarls through gritted teeth, but when she opens her hand there’s blood on it and Mary hears her swear under her breath. Mary springs into action, going back out to the kitchenette for a damp wad of paper towels, and on her return she drops into a crouch before Mrs. Coulter and tentatively dabs at the wound. It’s fractional, really, just three crescent-shaped cuts that match her nails, but it’s their cause that makes Mary frown. Lyra was strange enough. This is something else.
Mrs. Coulter lets her do it. But she’s rigid to the touch, and for the first time Mary considers that maybe her discomfort earlier wasn’t simply social difficulty but something else. Something physical under the skin.
“Apologies,” she says. “I… lost control.”
Mary looks up and meets her eyes. She has a strange face, all proud angles and harsh lines. A face that Mary wants to stare at for a long time, if only to puzzle out its intricacies, understand how it works. The scientist in her regards quite how close they are with analytical enthusiasm; the ex-nun remembers the third reason she left the convent.
She clears her throat and steps back, stares furiously at the floor until she can get the flush on her cheeks under control. When she’s reasonably sure she’s managed it, she looks up to see a curious expression on Mrs. Coulter’s face. No longer pained or quietly furious, but something else. Is that a smirk tugging at her lips?
Mrs. Coulter is attractive, and Mrs. Coulter knows it.
Mary turns away and presses a hand to her forehead. She’s tipped her hand, rather. She’s never going to get the power back in this conversation now. Unless–
“I looked you up,” she says, without turning around.
There’s a silence. “And what did you find?”
That’s when Mary turns around. Mrs. Coulter’s smirk has dropped, though her demeanour is still cool, unruffled. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. So, either-” Mary leans back against the desk “-you’re not who you say you are, and you’ve been lying to me just like everyone else who came in here looking for Lyra-”
Mrs. Coulter stiffens. Don’t think Mary doesn’t notice her stiffen.
“-or else you are who you say you are, but you’re not from here.” She’s past relying on miracles, but it certainly feels like one that her voice remains steady. She sounds mad. She sounds mad. But Google covers the world; it doesn’t reach beyond that. It doesn’t reach anywhere else. And if she’s to believe Lyra - and she wants to, she thinks she ought to, she thinks the girl was telling the truth - then where else is the sort of question she should be asking. “I’d like it if we could be honest with each other.”
Mrs. Coulter shifts in her seat. “Not from here, you say. Well, we knew that already. I told you I don’t live here in Oxford.”
“Come on, now, you know that’s not what I meant. This whole thing has been- has been one leap of faith after another after another, so what’s one more?” She pauses, catches her breath. Her next words come out slowly, deliberately. “Are you from another world?”
(Reason four: asking impertinent questions she shouldn’t know the answer to.)
Mrs. Coulter stands up. She places the bloodied paper towels on the desk, on top of Mary’s doctoral thesis, and turns so she’s facing the door. Mouth mere inches from Mary’s neck; Mary shivers. “Yes,” she whispers, and Mary leans into the sound despite herself, eyes fluttering closed, to feel the ghost of a kiss on her cheek-
When she opens her eyes the room is empty.
It’s difficult to believe the whole thing wasn’t a dream. But when she looks at the desk next to her she finds the bunch of bloodied paper towels, and she picks them up and clenches them in her fist. They crinkle in her grip. Real enough, and Mrs. Coulter bleeds red like all the rest. Nor was the something different about her imaginary.
So–
The Cave. That’s where her answers lie. With the Cave and with Dust, and with the woman who just walked out the door.
Reason number five she left the convent: she was always chasing after things out of reach. Always longing, grasping for the prohibited, the impossible. And she loved it.
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