Page 72 of Ringer
She was reassured, however, when after a long pause, Dr. O’Donnell stood up. “Wait here,” she said, and slipped out the door. When she reappeared, she was holding asmall, unmarked bottle of fluid, along with one of the long-snouted syringes Lyra had despised back at Haven, for their cruel curiosity. Now, she was relieved to see it.
“What is it?” Lyra asked. Dr. O’Donnell found a pair of medical gloves at the bottom of a desk drawer and cinched them carefully on her fingers.
“A new medicine,” Dr. O’Donnell said. She drew the liquid carefully into the syringe, keeping her back to Lyra. “Very rare. Very expensive.”
“Will it cure me?” Lyra asked. Hope buoyed her, swelled her with air, and made her feel as if she might lift off toward the ceiling. “Will it make all the prions go away?”
“With any luck,” Dr. O’Donnell said. Then: “Hold out your arm for me.”
Dr. O’Donnell offered Caelum a couch in the office next to hers, which belonged to a beautiful woman named Anju Patel. But in the end, since Caelum insisted on sleeping next to Lyra, Dr. O’Donnell and Anju maneuvered a second couch into Dr. O’Donnell’s office instead.
“Sorry if there are any crumbs in the cushions,” Anju said. She had appeared suddenly, practically careening through the door, wearing sweatpants and an inside-out T-shirt, as if she’d dressed in a hurry. Lyra had overheard Anju tell Dr. O’Donnell she’d been in bed when someonehad rung her up to share the news of Lyra and Caelum’s arrival.
The medicine had filled Lyra with a kind of happy warmth: already, she could picture the prions breaking apart, like mist by the sun.
“Cupcakes are my coffee. I need at least one a day just to keep moving.” Anju turned to Dr. O’Donnell. “Sorry, I don’t—I mean, do they understand me?”
“We understand you,” Caelum said. “You like to eat cupcakes?”
For some reason his voice made Anju startle. Then she began to laugh.
“Oh God,” she said. She had tears in her eyes, soon, from laughing, though Lyra didn’t know what was funny. “Yeah, I do. I really do.”
After Dr. O’Donnell had cleaned and bandaged the cut on Caelum’s cheek and set him up with an ice pack to help reduce the swelling around his eye, she left in search of Advil and something to help Caelum sleep. Anju Patel stayed, staring. Her eyes, dark as the nicotine candies Rick had sucked sometimes, were enormous, and Lyra had a sudden fear she would be spiraled down inside them, like water down a drain.
“Are you a doctor too?” Lyra asked, both because she was curious and because she was slowly learning to dislike silence. At Haven, silence, her silence, had not been achoice but simply a condition.
Anju Patel laughed again. “God, no,” she said. “I can’t even get my blood drawn. I’m a baby for things like that.” Lyra didn’t know what she meant, or why anyone would be unable to have blood drawn—for a second she thought Anju meant there was something physically wrong with her, that she couldn’t. “I’m in sales. Licensing, really.”
“What’s licensing?” Caelum asked. Lyra, too, had never heard the word.
Anju Patel’s face changed. “Do you like to ask questions?” she asked, instead of answering. “Are you very curious?”
Caelum shrugged. Again the shadow swept across Lyra’s mind, like a dark-winged bird brushing her with its feather.
“When we don’t know something,” Lyra said, “we ask to know it.”
Anju nodded thoughtfully, as if there were something surprising about that. Maybe Anju was just very stupid. She took a long time to answer.
“Licensing is about rights,” she said finally, very slowly. “It’s about who has the right to do what. It’s about who has the right to own what.”
A chill moved down Lyra’s body and raised the hair on her arms. It always came back to ownership.
“Let’s say you have an idea, a good idea, and you wantto share it. To make sure other people can use it. But it was your idea, so you should get rewarded.” Anju was talking very slowly, like the nurses at Haven always had when they were forced to address the replicas directly. Maybe because they had known all along of the holes that would eventually make shrapnel of their brains; maybe they had already zoomed forward in time and seen the replicas idiotic, unable to control their bodies, paralyzed and silenced and then dead.
But didn’t Anju know that Dr. O’Donnell had given Lyra special medicine? Didn’t she understand that Lyra’s brain would be saved?
“You mean paid,” Caelum said, and Anju nodded.
“Exactly. Solicensingtakes care of that. We license a thing so that we can then replicate it all over”—she caught her use of the word, and smiled at them as if they were all sharing a joke—“and make sure that no one uses it illegally, for free.”
In the outside that was the most important rule: that nothing was free, and everything would be paid for, one way or another.
Then something occurred to her. “Were the replicas licensed?”
Anju barely moved, but nonetheless Lyra was aware that everything, even her skin, had suddenly tightened. “What do you mean?”
Shewasstupid. She must be. “Were the replicas licensed?” she repeated. “Is that why the Gods”—an old habit, to think of them that way—“I mean, why Dr. Haven and Dr. Saperstein were allowed to make so many of them?”
