The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [125]
"It is alive?" Lucy said. She seemed fascinated. Almost, she seemed ready to climb down into the crater.
"I don't know," Orphan said. He looked at the thing in the crater.
Of the Bookman, of his other self, nothing remained. Or not quite nothing. At the centre of the explosion, at the bottom of the small crater formed, there was…
Something.
It looked like a small plant. But no – when he peered at it closer, Orphan could see how it was made of some strange material, part-organic, part-metal: a thin branch rose from the earth and sprouted crystalline flowers, and leaves that were a silvery grey caught the light as they turned in an invisible breeze.
"It's beautiful," he said, and Lucy smiled at him, and nodded. He put his arm around her.
Already, the plant was growing. Thin shoots were emerging, spreading out from the centre; silk-thin strands of spun silver, reaching cautiously out, setting root.
It was a melding, he thought: a union. He could almost feel it reaching to him, as an old friend might do in greeting. The leaves chimed as they moved: they looked like concave dishes, and he had the sense of listening ears.
"I think it's a baby," Lucy said, and it was Orphan's turn to smile. He felt whole again. Completed.
Branches moved like antennae. They seemed to be greeting him. On an impulse, he waved back, and Lucy laughed.
He looked at her. She was beautiful, whole, just the way he remembered her. He held her close to him. She was real.
"Let's go," Lucy said. She looked into his eyes, ran her hand over his face. She too, he realised, had to reassure herself that he was real.
"I think it wants to be left alone."
He thought about the other. Another tool, fashioned the way Orphan had been fashioned. And yet… he had sacrificed himself for them. So one of them, at least, could still win through. Could be with Lucy again. He wondered if he would have done the same.
He held Lucy's hand in his and they walked away. Behind them leaves chimed, a soft musical sound, a complex rhythm hanging just on the edge of understanding.
They emerged into a side-street two days later, filthy, in Orphan's case starving.
Lucy had been eating the pages of books.
"I swam with the whales, you know," she had said to him. She had a dreamy look in her eyes. "Under the Thames and, later, in the open ocean."
Orphan had said, "I thought you were dead."
Lucy had shaken her head. "I was, for a while. But he gave me a new body."
It took him a while to get used to the idea. She was not an automaton – she was Lucy still, he thought. Just in another body, a construct not of flesh but of the Bookman's machines. It did disturb him – especially when she began eating the paper – but he found that he grew used to the idea quickly, was almost jealous of her. But in the end, he was, simply, happy to be with her again. They were all machines, he thought, just like La Mettrie had said in L'homme Machine all those years ago. So he, Orphan, was a machine of flesh and blood, and Lucy, now, was made of something else, more complex perhaps – but they were the same, and…
They were in love.
Sometimes that was enough.
The first thing Orphan did when they came out of the ground was to look for food. They had come out near enough to the High Street to ensure that, in only a short time, they were sitting quite comfortably in the Queen's Lane Coffee House, snug at a small wooden table by the window, holding hands. Orphan ordered the largest breakfast on the menu.
The coffee house was heaving with students, commercial travellers and dons. The talk was of the capital. Finding a newspaper, Lucy spread out the pages on the table and they read it together.
BREAKING NEWS!
The Capital. By our Special Correspondent.
The threat of bloodshed was lifted yesterday night when, following urgent talks between the government, the Queen's personal envoy, Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., rebel leaders