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.
“I 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 genotypes, giggled. Dr. O’Donnell’s eyes clicked to Lyra’s. “Lyra,” she said, and Lyra felt a little electrical jolt, as if she’d just touched something too hot.
Afterward she went through Haven naming things, marking them as familiar, as hers. Everyone called G-Wing the Box, but she named other places too, named the mess hall Stew Pot, and C-Wing, where the male replicas were kept, the Hidden Valley. The security cameras that tracked her everywhere were Glass Eyes, the blood pressure monitor wrapped around her upper arm Squeezeme. All the nurses got names, and the doctors too, at least the ones she saw regularly. She couldn’t name the researchers or the birthers because she hardly ever saw them, but the barracks where the birthers slept she named the Factory, since that’s where all the new human models came out, before they were transferred to Postnatal and then, if they survived, to the dorms, to be bounced and tickled and engaged at least two hours a day.
She named Dr. Saperstein God, because he controlled everything.
Lyra was always careful to sit next to Dr. O’Donnell when she read, with her head practically in Dr. O’Donnell’s lap, to try to make sense of the dizzying swarm of brushstroke symbols as Dr. O’Donnell read, to try to tack the sounds down to the letters. She concentrated so hard, it made the space behind her eyeballs ache.
One day, it seemed to her that Dr. O’Donnell began reading more slowly—not so slowly that the others would notice, but just enough that Lyra could make better sense of the edges of the words and how they snagged on the edges of certain letters, before leaping over the little white spaces of the page. At first she thought it was her imagination. Then, when Dr. O’Donnell placed a finger on the page, and began tracing individual lines of text, tapping occasionally the mysterious dots and dashes, or pausing underneath a particularly entangled word, Lyra knew that it wasn’t.
Dr. O’Donnell was trying to help Lyra to read.
And slowly, slowly—like a microscope adjusted by degrees and degrees, ticking toward clearer resolution—words began to free themselves from the mysterious inky puddles on the page, to throw themselves suddenly at Lyra’s understanding. I. And. Went. Now.
It couldn’t last. Lyra should have known, but of course she didn’t.
She had just gotten a name. She’d been born, really, for the second time. She hardly knew anything.
One Sunday afternoon, Dr. O’Donnell didn’t come. The girls waited for nearly an hour before Cassiopeia, growing bored, announced she was going to walk down to the beach behind A-Wing and try to collect seashells. Although it wasn’t strictly forbidden, Cassiopeia was one of the few replicas that ever ventured down to the water. Lyra had sometimes followed her, but was too scared to go on her own—frightened of the stories the nurses told, of man-eating sharks in Wahlee Sound, of alligators and poisonous snakes in the marshes.
It was a pretty day, not too hot, and great big clouds puffed up with importance. But Lyra didn’t want to go outside. She didn’t want to do anything but sit on the floor next to Dr. O’Donnell, so close she could smell the mix of antiseptic and lemon lotion on her skin, and the fibers of the paper puffing into the air whenever Dr. O’Donnell turned the page.
She had a terrible thought: Dr. O’Donnell must be sick. It was the only explanation. She had never missed a Sunday since the readings had begun, and Lyra refused to believe that Dr. O’Donnell had simply grown tired of their Sunday afternoons together. That she was tiring. That she was too damaged, too slow for Dr. O’Donnell.
Forgetting that she hated the Box, that she held her breath whenever she came within fifty feet of its red-barred doors, Lyra began to run in that direction. She couldn’t explain the sudden terror that gripped her, a feeling like waking in the middle of the night, surrounded by darkness, and having no idea where she was.
She’d nearly reached C-Wing when she heard the sudden rise of angry voices—one of them Dr. O’Donnell’s. She drew back, quickly, into an alcove. She could just make out Dr. O’Donnell and God, facing off in one of the empty testing rooms. The door was partially open, and their voices floated out into the hall.
“I hired you,” God said, “to do your job, not to play at Mother goddamn Teresa.” He raised his hand, and Lyra thought he might hit her. Then she saw that he was holding the old, weathered copy of The Little Prince Dr. O’Donnell had been reading.
“Don’t you see?” Dr. O’Donnell’s face was flushed. Her freckles had disappeared. “What we’re doing . . . Christ. They deserve a little happiness, don’t they? Besides, you said yourself they do better when they get some affection.”