“You mean paid,” Caelum said, and Anju nodded.
“Exactly. So licensing takes 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?”
She was stupid. 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?”
Anju seemed to relax, and Lyra wondered why the first question had bothered her. “No, no,” Anju said. “You can’t license human beings. Licensing is for . . . well, for ideas. Techniques. Methods. Let’s say I invented a new way to manufacture a chair, for example. I might patent that, and then sell it through a licensing agreement, so other people could use my method when they made their own chairs. Do you understand?”
Lyra did understand, at least in general terms. Licensing was a way to make money off replicating ideas, as far as she could tell. But she couldn’t understand why CASECS needed a person like Anju Patel. Haven had never had a licensing department. She would have heard about it.
“Can you license a medicine?” Lyra asked, trying to puzzle out why CASECS, with its nest of cluttered offices and the smell not of antiseptic but of old carpet, made her uneasy.
“Oh, sure,” Anju said, and Lyra felt instantly better. That was all right, then. CASECS made cures and licensed them because in the outside world money was everything. “You can patent a medical technique, too. About a hundred medical patents are issued per month—”
Anju broke off suddenly, and glancing up, Lyra saw that Dr. O’Donnell had returned. In the split second before she knew Lyra’s eyes had landed on her, she appeared baldly angry: it was like a raw, hard flush had ruined her complexion, even though Lyra didn’t think her color had actually changed. The stain was invisible, and as soon as she saw Lyra she smiled and her face smoothed over.
“You must be so tired,” she said. “All the way from Tennessee, all by yourselves.”
“I can have Sonja round up some blankets,” Anju said.
“Already did.” Dr. O’Donnell didn’t look at Anju, and her tone swept a thin band of cold through the room. She was obviously angry at Anju for speaking with the replicas, but Lyra didn’t know why.
Anju left without another word. A moment later another woman appeared, this one even younger than Anju and with the stoop-shouldered look of someone who got tall very young, carrying an armful of blankets.
She also seemed as if she wanted to speak to Lyra and Caelum, but Dr. O’Donnell intercepted her before she could even step foot in the room.
“Thank you, Sonja,” she said, in the same tone she’d used before on Anju. Lyra didn’t remember this tone of voice. It reminded her of someone she knew, someone not from Haven but from outside, but she couldn’t think who. More holes, maybe, or she was simply tired. Her whole body ached. Her mind felt like a bruise, throbbing with a single message of pain and tenderness.
Dr. O’Donnell had small white pills for Caelum that Lyra recognized as Sleepers. She felt a rush of sudden affection: the Sleepers were everyone’s favorites, those small soldiers that herded you off into a mist of dreaming. But when Lyra reached out for her dosage, Dr. O’Donnell shook her head.
“It isn’t safe,” she said. “Not when you cracked your head. I’ll have to wake you every few hours. Sorry,” she said, but any regret Lyra felt was outweighed by the sudden pleasure of Dr. O’Donnell’s expression, which softened into the one she remembered so well. Instead Lyra got reddish Advil pills, slick and sugared on her tongue.
Caelum settled on the couch next to Lyra’s. He hadn’t said much since Anju had first appeared, except to say he wouldn’t leave Lyra, and when Dr. O’Donnell tried to place a blanket over him he caught her wrist, and for a moment they were frozen there, staring at each other.
“I’ll do it,” he said. But already Lyra saw him relaxing, as the Sleepers did their work.
“I’ll be here all night,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “Just shout if you need something.” She smiled at Lyra, and momentarily the changes to her face, the new wrinkles and the slightly thinner skin, were erased. “And I’ll see you in a few hours.”
She turned off the lights. It was surprisingly dark. The window was covered by thin slat-blinds but must have been facing away from the parking lot, toward the fence and beyond it, the woods. The only light at all came from a tissue-thin crevice around the door, which appeared as a result like a faint, glowing silhouette. But Lyra could still hear the muffled rhythm of music, although after only a minute, it cut off abruptly. Then: footsteps ran like water, and whispered voices outside their door soon flowed away.
“Caelum?” Lyra whispered. Then, a little louder: “Are you awake?”
He didn’t answer for so long she thought he wouldn’t. When he did speak, the edges of his words were round and soft, as if they were melting on his tongue. “I don’t trust her,” was all he said.
Lyra wanted to be angry with him. CASECS and its unfamiliar sounds, its dizzying arrangement of cubicles and ceiling tiles and cluttered desks and new names, had exhausted her. “You don’t know her like I do,” she said. “That’s all.”
Caelum didn’t respond. After a minute, she heard his breathing slow and realized he was asleep. She closed her eyes, expecting to drop quickly into a dream, but instead she found her mind cycling, insect-like, landing quickly on old memories, on visions of Haven, on quick-splice images she’d thought she had forgotten.
She was still awake when the door opened again. She thought at first it was because Dr. O’Donnell was coming to check on her. A band of light fell sharply across her eyes. She squeezed her eyes shut, and was about to ask for water when she heard an unfamiliar voice and froze.
“Are you sure they’re sleeping?” It was a boy’s voice, totally unknown to her.
“Positive. O’Donnell was hunting around for Ambien.”
Because of the lightening of the colors behind her eyelids, Lyra knew they were standing there in the doorway, staring.
“It’s weirder in person,” the boy said, after a minute. “They look so . . . normal. Don’t they?”
“What did you think? They’d have three heads or something?”