The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [111]
"You're dead," Orphan said, and Gilgamesh smiled, and nodded. "Am I hallucinating?"
"You're asking me?"
There was gentle amusement in the question. Orphan realised its futility. He said, "What is happening to me?"
"This egg," Gilgamesh said. "This Translation. I once heard stories… I think it can communicate with the Bookman's machines, somehow. There are so many of us here, Orphan… so many souls in a bottle, with no senses, no body, nothing but the patterns of what we once were. He doesn't know, yet. You must be careful."
So many… Lucy, Orphan thought. But Gilgamesh, as if reading his mind, shook his head. "She is not in here."
"What does that mean?"
"I don't know. Maybe she is stored separately. Maybe she was given a body again."
Orphan thought back. He had seen Lucy before… There was a boat. It was just after he had met Mycroft. He stood, alone, on the embankment, when it came sailing out of the mist, a single person sitting in the prow, and his breath slammed into his lungs and froze his thoughts into small hard diamonds.
The person in the boat was Lucy. She was dressed in a fine white dress that seemed to form a part of the fog, and she sat in an unnatural calm as the boat sailed without anyone to steer it, coming close to the bank of the river, close enough for Orphan to almost reach a hand and touch her. Almost.
"Maybe," Gilgamesh said, his voice soft, "she has been erased."
Orphan felt the words like pinpricks of pain in his chest. "No," he said. And again. "No."
"Are you coming for her?" Gilgamesh said.
"For all of you," Orphan said, and his old friend chuckled. "You're a good boy, Orphan."
"What happened to you?" Orphan said. And he thought back to the empty space under the bridge, and to Gilgamesh's last message for him, in a bottle bobbing on the water, and he thought, I needed you.
"I know you did," Gilgamesh said, again knowing his thoughts. "I wish I could have been there for you, Orphan. William. For both of you, now." He said the second name hesitantly, as if unsure of the way it should be pronounced. Orphan looked at him, saw the tired tilt of his face, the lines that had been there for centuries. "William," the other whispered, as if tasting the word on his tongue.
"Your mother would have been so proud of you…" Gilgamesh said.
Orphan sat down. Across the bars the other copied his movement. "Tell me about her," Orphan said, and the other spoke with the same voice, saying the same words. "Tell me about Mary."
Gilgamesh sighed. It was a long, painful sound like a shard of broken glass. But he did not object. "Very well," he said.
I knew your father first (so Gilgamesh began). I have never told you this. I've never told you many things. He was a native Vespuccian, a proud man from the Great Sioux Nation who had discovered in himself one day an inexplicable passion for the sea. His name was Kangee, which means "raven'. He was not a large man, but he moved gracefully on board ship even in the roughest weather, though he always seemed a little lost on land.
I was working in the docks at that time, rolling barrels of wine on the Isle of Dogs. Many times we'd drill a narrow hole in the barrel and drink from the rich, exotic wines, without the owners knowing or our employers caring. It was almost a tax they had to pay. I knew the docks well, by touch and smell if not by sight, and I liked the work. It was as close to the sea as I could come.
Though I was the Bookman's creature he left me more or less alone. No doubt he had more use for me just as I was, a harmless blind man on the docks, unnoticed by most, yet hearing all of what passed. Every so often he went into my mind, and got from it what information I had gathered. What use he put it to I didn't know. The Bookman's plans have always been far-reaching and opaque.
It was a good life… I met Kangee in the Ship's Bell, a lively, crowded pub I sometimes frequented. It was always busy with sailors from a hundred different