Replica (Replica #1)(4)
The inspections had stopped a long time ago, however. Now the Suits came, walked through all the wings, from Admin to the Box, spoke to God, and then returned to the mainland on their boat, and Lyra found that she’d grown less and less interested in them. They belonged to another world. They might as well have been flies touching down, only to take flight again. They didn’t matter to her, not like Thermoscan did, not like her little bed and her windowsill and the meaning embedded deep in a hieroglyph of words.
Today, in particular, she couldn’t think about the Suits, or the mysterious disappearance of number 72. The day after trash day was Monday, which meant Cog Testing, and Lazy Ass, and her last opportunity for a week.
Lyra couldn’t remember when the idea of stealing from Admin had first come to her. It had started, in a way, with Dr. O’Donnell. Dr. O’Donnell had come to Haven six or seven years ago; it was before Lyra had her monthly bleeding. (“Your period,” Don’t-Even-Think-About-It had said gruffly, and, in a rare moment of generosity, shown Lyra how to scrub out her underwear with cold water. “Bleeding makes it sound like a gunshot wound.”) Dr. O’Donnell was—apart from Cassiopeia and numbers 7–10, her four genotypes, all of them genetically and physically identical—the prettiest person at Haven.
Unlike the other nurses and doctors, Dr. O’Donnell didn’t seem to dislike the replicas. She hung around in the dorms even when she wasn’t assigned to monitor. She asked questions. She was the first person who’d ever asked Lyra a question and actually expected a reply—other than “Does it hurt when I touch you there?” or “How’s your appetite?”—and laughed easily, especially over the things the replicas believed, like that the rest of the world must be the size of five or six Havens or that in natural-born humans fathers served no purpose. She taught the replicas clapping games and sang to them in a high, clear voice.
Dr. O’Donnell was shocked when she found out that Haven had no library—only medical textbooks occasionally used for reference moldering in an awkwardly shaped room no one quite knew the use for, and the Bible that Don’t-Even-Think-About-It carted around with her, and occasionally used to take a swipe at replicas that disobeyed her, or to whack the ones too idiotic and brain-scrambled to follow instructions at all.
Whenever Dr. O’Donnell left the island, she returned with a few books in her bag. On Sunday afternoons, she sat in the dorms and read out loud. First it was only books with lots of pictures. Then longer books, with small type running across every page, so many letters it made Lyra dizzy to look. A few dozen replicas always gathered around to hear the stories, and afterward, after lights-out, repeated them in whispers for the other replicas, often making up or mixing up details, Jack and the Beanstalk that grew to Oz; the Lion, the Witch, and the Big Friendly Giant. It was a relief from the boredom, from the smallness of the world. Five wings, six counting the Box. Half the doors locked. All the world circumscribed by water. Half the replicas too dumb to talk, another quarter of them too sick, and still more too angry and violent.
No escape. Never escape.
But for Lyra, something deeper happened. She fell in love, although she didn’t know it and would never have thought in those terms, since she didn’t understand what love was and had only rarely heard the word. Under the influence of Dr. O’Donnell’s voice, and her long fingers (some of them scattered with tiny freckles) turning the pages, a long-buried part of her consciousness woke, stirred, and opened.
Dr. O’Donnell was the one who had taught them the names for the various constellations—Hercules and Lyra, Cassiopeia and Venus, Ursa Major and Minor—and explained that stars were masses made of white-hot gas, hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of miles, farther than they could imagine.
Lyra remembered sitting on her cot one Sunday afternoon, while Dr. O’Donnell read to them from one of Lyra’s favorite books, Goodnight Moon, and suddenly Cassiopeia—who was known only as 6 then—spoke up.
“I want a name,” she’d said. “I want a name like the stars have.”
And Lyra had felt profoundly embarrassed: she’d thought 6 was Cassiopeia’s name, just as 24 was hers.
Dr. O’Donnell had gone around the room, assigning names. “Cassiopeia,” she said. “Ursa. Venus. Calliope.” Calliope, formerly 7 and the meanest of Cassiopeia’s genotypes, giggled. Dr. O’Donnell’s eyes clicked to Lyra’s. “Lyra,” she said, and Lyra felt a little electrical jolt, as if she’d just touched something too hot.
Afterward she went through Haven naming things, marking them as familiar, as hers. Everyone called G-Wing the Box, but she named other places too, named the mess hall Stew Pot, and C-Wing, where the male replicas were kept, the Hidden Valley. The security cameras that tracked her everywhere were Glass Eyes, the blood pressure monitor wrapped around her upper arm Squeezeme. All the nurses got names, and the doctors too, at least the ones she saw regularly. She couldn’t name the researchers or the birthers because she hardly ever saw them, but the barracks where the birthers slept she named the Factory, since that’s where all the new human models came out, before they were transferred to Postnatal and then, if they survived, to the dorms, to be bounced and tickled and engaged at least two hours a day.
She named Dr. Saperstein God, because he controlled everything.
Lyra was always careful to sit next to Dr. O’Donnell when she read, with her head practically in Dr. O’Donnell’s lap, to try to make sense of the dizzying swarm of brushstroke symbols as Dr. O’Donnell read, to try to tack the sounds down to the letters. She concentrated so hard, it made the space behind her eyeballs ache.