The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [80]
"Is that why he fights you?"
"I don't know," Wyvern said. "If you see him again, ask him."
As he sat now, looking at the waves, Orphan couldn't help but feel a sense of something imminent approaching. The pirate captain had listened to him, and in his turn had handed him a story. Stories, he thought. What was it Gilgamesh had said to him, all that time ago? This is the time of myths. They are woven into the present like silk strands from the past, like a wire mesh from the future, creating an interlacing pattern, a grand design, a repeating motif. Don't dismiss myth, boy. And never, ever, dismiss the Bookman.
He was trapped in other people's stories. He thought now about the Bookman. That awful, mysterious power that had so effortlessly manipulated his life, who had taken Lucy from him and sent him on this quest: he had feared him, but now, a different image of the Bookman rose in his mind, of the servant, lashing out at his former masters – he was a creature of pity, almost.
"Then came the time," Wyvern said, "when we were awakened. When that man came to the island, a barbarous adventurer, thinking to discover the origin of an old, worthless myth. He and his men landed on the island, and in so doing roused us at last from our cold slumber. And so we did the only thing we could."
"What did you do?" He remembered the play he had watched at the Rose. The story of the Ancient Mariner. Gilgamesh's journal. And suddenly he thought – Poor Vespucci. He did not deserve that.
"There was only one way to get back," Captain Wyvern said. "We no longer understood our old sciences, did not know how to create from scratch that level of civilisation. Our librarian, perhaps, could have helped us. But when we awoke he was gone. And so… survival, Orphan. It has always been about survival."
"You took over the throne," Orphan said.
"We had to," Wyvern said. "Or, at least, some of us had. To change the history of this world and bring about a new technological civilisation, all leading to this moment in time: when we could use the science humanity has developed, to send a message home. To come and take us back."
"No!" Orphan said. The words of the Bookman came back to him then. "It will tell your people to come here! To help you settle this world, and make it your own."
He was startled by the pirate's chuckle. "An invasion? No. You wouldn't understand, Orphan. Where we come from… this place is nothing to my kind. We lived in great structures in space, enormous habitats we formed to suit ourselves, where all our wishes could come true, and every dream effortlessly enacted. We had the power of gods. No. My people want to go back, before we all die out. This world – this planet – is difficult for us."
Orphan didn't know who, what to believe. He set it aside, for the moment. "And you?" he said. What do you want, he wondered. What do you get from living as we humans do, worse than we do, living like a savage on your shabby pirate ship?
Again, he was surprised by the pirate's laugh. "I did not want to rule a world," the lizard said. "I never did. For me, this world is my paradise. Harsher, simpler – and more honest than any other. I could have played in a makeshift court and ruled a primitive empire, but I prefer this, boy. To live and to die by cannon or blade, and may the Bookman and my technology-worshipping kind all end up at the bottom of the sea, if the sea would take them."
It was the last thing he had said to him that night. Then he had dismissed him, and Orphan rejoined the others, and in the coming days and weeks lived as they did, as the captain did. Was it freedom?
It was a kind of freedom, he thought. But each being – human, or machine, or lizardine – each sought, perhaps, its own freedom, and there were many types of it, and all hard to win.
He wanted his own freedom now. And, more than that, he realised,