The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [22]
"The Bookman…" Orphan said. "But I saw him there," he objected. "I saw him at the theatre." Even to himself he sounded petulant. Then his eyes fell on Byron and he whispered, "It was a machine."
The Byron automaton stirred. "Was it?" he said. "What is a machine, Orphan? La Mettrie wrote that 'the human body is a machine which winds its own springs'. Can a machine act in a play? Can a machine play music? Can a machine love?"
"I… I don't know," Orphan said. He looked from Byron to Irene. "I don't understand." He wanted to shout. "What has this got to do with Lucy?"
"Following the explosion in Richmond Park," Irene Adler said, "a brief, powerful burst of concentrated energy was recorded, originating at the very moment the book exploded in Lucy's hands. We have recorded a similar transmission after the explosion at the Rose. These books with which the Bookman so cunningly kills – they are not mere books. They are devices."
Orphan swallowed. The beer stood forgotten on the table before him. He said, "Devices of what?"
"Perhaps," Irene said, so quietly she may have been speaking to herself, "they are recording devices."
"And they record… what?" He thought back to the Rose, to the counterfeit Beerbohm Tree, indistinguishable from the real thing. As if the man had been copied in his entirety, as if he had been recreated, made anew, and left to perform his role as if nothing had happened… And he said, in a hushed voice, the thought cooling him down as if he were still outside, and it was snowing, "You think he takes people's souls."
Lucy, he suddenly thought. So that was what the Inspector had wanted him to understand. If she was not killed, but merely… what? Abducted? Translated? Taken by the lord of Hades, to reside forever in his dark and lonely court?
"Perhaps," Irene Adler said. There was such pain in her eyes that, for a moment, Orphan couldn't bear to look at them. She was, he thought, gazing inwards, looking deep within herself at a memory he could not see. She, too, he thought suddenly, the realisation striking him, had lost someone she loved to the Bookman. And he wondered who it was.
Across the table from him Byron stirred again. "La Mettrie," Byron said, "says that 'the soul is but an empty word, of which no one has any idea, and which an enlightened man should only use to signify the part in us that thinks. Given the least principle of motion, animated bodies will have all that is necessary for moving, feeling, thinking, repenting, or in a word for conducting themselves in the physical realm, and in the moral realm which depends upon it.'" He sighed and looked down at himself, and shook his head as if confused. "I will ask you again," he said. "What is a machine?"
But Orphan didn't answer. Could it be, he wondered – could Lucy, somehow, still be alive? Could she come back, the way Beerbohm Tree had come back, if only for a short while? He said, his voice choking, "How could I get her back?"
"Listen," Irene said. She inched her ear at Byron, prompting him to speak.
"I don't know who – what – the Bookman is," Byron said. "But I know this: there are more artificers on this earth than the bureaucrats of the Babbage company who made me. I am but a machine. I am human-made, and as imperfect as a human. But I listen." His eyes, those great and vacant marbles, were no longer empty, and he turned his head in a delicate movement, as if listening to something unheard. "I listen to the talk of machines, to the exchange of Tesla communications, to the constant hum of the aether. We simulacra are rare and far apart, so far. But we talk to each other, and to others who are not like us in form, but whose souls are. And the rumours persist."
He spoke with a great gravity, and a little sadness. And it seemed to