Replica Read Free

a week.
    Lyra couldn’t remember when the idea of stealing from Admin had first come to her. It had started, in a way, with Dr. O’Donnell. Dr. O’Donnell had come to Haven six or seven years ago; it was before Lyra had her monthly bleeding. (“Your period,” Don’t-Even-Think-About-It had said gruffly, and, in a rare moment of generosity, shown Lyra how to scrub out her underwear with cold water. “Bleeding makes it sound like a gunshot wound.”) Dr. O’Donnell was—apart from Cassiopeia and numbers 7–10, her four genotypes, all of them genetically and physically identical—the prettiest person at Haven.
    Unlike the other nurses and doctors, Dr. O’Donnell didn’t seem to dislike the replicas. She hung around in the dorms even when she wasn’t assigned to monitor. She asked questions. She was the first person who’d ever asked Lyra a question and actually expected a reply—other than “Does it hurt when I touch you there?” or “How’s your appetite?”—and laughed easily, especially over the things the replicas believed, like that the rest of the world must be the size of five or six Havens or that in natural-born humans fathers served no purpose. She taught the replicas clapping games and sang to them in a high, clear voice.
    Dr. O’Donnell was shocked when she found out that Haven had no library—only medical textbooks occasionally used for reference moldering in an awkwardly shaped room no one quite knew the use for, and the Bible thatDon’t-Even-Think-About-It carted around with her, and occasionally used to take a swipe at replicas that disobeyed her, or to whack the ones too idiotic and brain-scrambled to follow instructions at all.
    Whenever Dr. O’Donnell left the island, she returned with a few books in her bag. On Sunday afternoons, she sat in the dorms and read out loud. First it was only books with lots of pictures. Then longer books, with small type running across every page, so many letters it made Lyra dizzy to look. A few dozen replicas always gathered around to hear the stories, and afterward, after lights-out, repeated them in whispers for the other replicas, often making up or mixing up details, Jack and the Beanstalk that grew to Oz; the Lion, the Witch, and the Big Friendly Giant. It was a relief from the boredom, from the smallness of the world. Five wings, six counting the Box. Half the doors locked. All the world circumscribed by water. Half the replicas too dumb to talk, another quarter of them too sick, and still more too angry and violent.
    No escape. Never escape.
    But for Lyra, something deeper happened. She fell in love, although she didn’t know it and would never have thought in those terms, since she didn’t understand what love was and had only rarely heard the word. Under the influence of Dr. O’Donnell’s voice, and her long fingers (some of them scattered with tiny freckles) turningthe pages, a long-buried part of her consciousness woke, stirred, and opened.
    Dr. O’Donnell was the one who had taught them the names for the various constellations—Hercules and Lyra, Cassiopeia and Venus, Ursa Major and Minor—and explained that stars were masses made of white-hot gas, hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of miles, farther than they could imagine.
    Lyra remembered sitting on her cot one Sunday afternoon, while Dr. O’Donnell read to them from one of Lyra’s favorite books, Goodnight Moon , and suddenly Cassiopeia—who was known only as 6 then—spoke up.
    â€œI want a name,” she’d said. “I want a name like the stars have.”
    And Lyra had felt profoundly embarrassed: she’d thought 6 was Cassiopeia’s name, just as 24 was hers.
    Dr. O’Donnell had gone around the room, assigning names. “Cassiopeia,” she said. “Ursa. Venus. Calliope.” Calliope, formerly 7 and the meanest of Cassiopeia’s