The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [79]
The lizard smiled. He hadn't answered straight away. Instead, he sighed, and said, "The Bookman," and was still. He seemed to be expecting a reply.
"I have no love of the Bookman," Orphan said, and felt all his helplessness and anger return as he spoke. "But he has his hold on me." Sudden bitterness made him add, "He has his hold over everyone."
"Not me," Wyvern said, and his lone eye twinkled. "The Bookman…" he said again, and shook his head. "I had forgotten him."
"Did you know him?" Orphan said, surprised.
"I knew of him," the pirate captain said. "Tell me, Orphan: have you ever wondered why? Ever wondered why the Bookman hates us so much?"
"I…" He was about to say no, and fell silent. The Bookman was on the side of humanity, he thought to say. But even as he thought it he knew it to be untrue. "Why?" he said, simply.
"Did you know your parents?" Wyvern said. Orphan shook his head. "No."
"Do you resent them?" Wyvern asked, "For not being there?"
Orphan touched his cheek. The blood from the pirate captain's blows had abated and congealed. "No," he said again. He had never known them. Gilgamesh, he suddenly thought. He had known them both, once. But he had never spoken to him about them. His father was a Vespuccian, and his mother… an enigma. But he had never felt the need to find out more. Neither was he angry at them. He had merely lived without.
"We have a lot in common," Wyvern said. Orphan thought he was referring to the two of them, but no. "Humanity and the–" and here he made an almost inaudible sound, somewhere between a hiss and a bark – "and the lizards, I should say. The Bookman didn't lie to you, Orphan. We come – came – from another place, from a planet orbiting another star. Why we left I do not know. Perhaps we were chased away, perhaps we chose to go. It was a long time ago – millions of years ago, perhaps. Time is different, out amongst the stars. In any case, we left, in a ship that sailed through space the way the Joker sails through the seas of Earth. There were not many of us on that journey – there are not many of us now. But we brought with us the tools of a civilisation no one remembered any more how to make – and we brought with us a servant, who was himself a tool we had forgotten how to use."
He looked at Orphan and seemed, suddenly, like a stern, ancient schoolteacher waiting for the response to a conundrum he had just posed.
Orphan remained mute. The implication of what Wyvern was saying was only slowly filtering in. A servant, he thought; and a thrill passed through him, in the way of an illicit pleasure.
"Our librarian," Wyvern said. "To put it simply, anyway. A machine, of sorts. A part-machine, part-biological construct, a repository of data, built to archive, store, sort and search." He sighed, a human sound in an alien face. "It's ironic. The librarian was built to remember, so we wouldn't have to. To be the store-house of all the forgotten, boring lore, of the ancient technology that made things work. We are not very good with machines, you see. Once, possibly. But not any more."
"What happened?" Orphan asked him.
"The ship crashed," Wyvern said. "Emergency systems were activated. The impact created a crater in a small, insignificant island, which lay in the insignificant sea of an insignificant planet. We were frozen and preserved by the machines. Like pickled onions in vinegar, which I am quite fond of." He barked a laugh. "We stayed like that for a long time, in stasis. The machines camouflaged the island and grew roots into its soil. But he didn't."
"The Bookman," Orphan said.
"Yes." The lizard's tail twitched. "His life, too, had been suspended with the impact. But his returned earlier, how or why I don't know. He was weak at first, trapped as we were trapped, but