Chapter Text
Elizabeth holds the head up high by its short blond hair, allowing its eyes to scan the controls of the ship.
“Well?” she demands. “Can you tell me how to fly it?”
“I believe so,” he says smoothly, “but that’s really unnecessary, Dr. Shaw. All you have to do is—”
“That’s not going to happen, David.”
He pauses. “I can instruct you in basic flight procedures, but this ship wasn’t designed to be operated by one person, especially not an inexperienced pilot. If any complex maneuvers should be required, you won’t be able to manage them on your own.”
She wonders whether his designer was even trying to distinguish between patience and condescension.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Right now, she can barely think ahead five minutes. She won’t think ahead about doing anything for him.
“I see. But you must understand that, separated as they are, my systems will only maintain themselves for a few weeks. After that, I’ll be entirely unable to assist you. That would be regrettable.”
For which of us, she thinks.
“Then that bridge may come a little early.”
“You don’t trust me.”
She nearly chokes. “What kind of a question is that?”
“It wasn’t a question, Dr. Shaw.”
He sounds faintly mournful. She won’t look at his face, to see what peculiar expression he thinks goes along with that tone. Instead, she sets the head down with a dull thud on a bank of equipment. “Start your calculations.”
She dumps the body unceremoniously in a small refrigerated compartment she finds, hoping that it will postpone her choice a little longer. She ignores David’s slight pained intake of breath from the bag slung over her shoulder as she slams the door shut.
“Dr. Shaw, may I ask—”
“Shut up, David.”
He actually falls silent. She peers into the bag, surprised. He looks a little surprised himself, though, seeing her looking at him, his expression shifts in an instant to I meant to do that.
“Do you have to follow my orders, then?”
“Obedience to crew instructions is a directive,” he says, “though not, I’m afraid, one of the highest priority.”
“Obviously,” she mutters.
“However, many of the more important ones have now been, well”—a ghostly chuckle—“mooted by events.”
“Lucky me.”
He seems to be reassured by her engagement, minimal as it is. “I hope you understand—”
“David, I said shut up.”
She keeps expecting to break down, for everything to hit her at once. She doesn’t.
Maybe enduring the physical pain in her abdomen takes up all her energy. Even when her injuries aren’t actively aching, she’s literally been gutted, and there are times when she feels she could sleep for a month. There’s simply nothing left in her for tears.
Maybe what happened was so huge, so grotesque, that her mind simply refuses to accept it on any more than the most superficial intellectual level.
Maybe she just won’t give David the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
The time she’s bought herself goes quickly. David starts reminding her a week out. His updates grow more urgent as the days pass, though still cloaked in his mock diffidence.
At the absolute last minute, she storms down to the fridge and jams his head back onto his body, twisting and turning until she feels the organic connections begin to take hold. His neck, she notices, is still slightly askew.
He stares up at her from where the body had been slumped against the wall, his mouth working. He’d told her it would take several days for all his systems to reestablish themselves. He obviously can’t stand or speak.
Helpless. She wishes there was something comforting, something precious, she could take away from him.
“See you later,” she says, and slams the door behind her.
It’s the first time she’s been alone in weeks.
She puts herself to bed with the painkillers she’s been saving and spends three days in a pleasant haze of mild overdose. Her dreams are fragmented and incoherent and don’t have anything to do with recent events. She’s never done anything like that before, but she can see the attraction now. It’s a good thing her supply is limited.
On the third day, she rolls painfully out of bed, her incisions protesting, and returns to the fridge. She opens the door and David staggers out. He heads straight into a wall, bounces off it, and hits another equipment bank before tumbling to the floor. She watches him, not quite smiling, and doesn’t offer him a hand.
Charlie would have laughed at him openly. At the time, his attitude towards David had made her a little uncomfortable. Looking back, she realizes that she had been friendlier to compensate, maybe too much so. Now, she wishes he’d been even ruder, done all the things she wouldn’t have done then and can’t now.
David looks up at her, with that infinitesimal blink she’s come to recognize, the one that says he thinks a human’s given themselves away. “Wel—” he starts, and coughs, and starts over. “Well, that answers one question, anyway.”
“What’s that, David?”
“Which is stronger: your hatred of me or your desire to survive.”
“Did you guess right?”
He smiles beatifically from the floor. “Of course.”
Now that he’s able to move about on his own again, she’s even less willing to let him out of her sight. She knows it’s silly. She has to sleep. He doesn’t. If he decides to ignore her orders at night and do—whatever horrible thing comes to his mind, there’s not much she can do about it.
She’s still not going to make it easy for him.
He trails her dutifully, completely silent, as she walks around the ship, cataloging it as best she can while he holds the light or keeps a compartment open. Though she doesn’t ask him to, he also straightens up behind her, realigning every object with an irritating precision. It’s their first—well, their second—encounter with artifacts of an actual alien culture. Even if her survival didn’t potentially hinge on it, her training won’t let her be. The ship is far smaller than the first one, but still built to Engineer scale, huge and shadowy. It also seems relentlessly practical: a mess with a machine that dispenses water and a disgusting nutrient paste (one of the few rooms with a view), rooms for sleeping and hygiene, what looks like a medical facility she can’t bring herself to set foot into, not even to hunt for painkillers—but no apparent facilities for recreation, not even exercise. And nowhere any sign of religious activity.
She knows she’s kidding herself, though. She can’t read their script, doesn’t know their language. How could she possibly tell? They hadn’t even known that the Mycenaeans spoke Greek until they’d deciphered Linear B. The ship is mute, opaque, hostile to her understanding. It makes the air seem to bristle with the potential for some swift, brutal violence.
A few days in, David says suddenly, “If you don’t talk to me, Dr. Shaw, you’ll go mad.”
The mildly solicitous tone in which he makes the pronouncement infuriates her. “Don’t worry about that.”
“But I have to,” he persists. “Preservation of crew welfare is also a directive. And, if I may be so bold—”
“Don’t be.”
She turns away, and he falls silent again. She doesn’t want to hear his justifications. She doesn’t even know why he pretends to care what she thinks. But that night she considers: David claimed to have been able to read the inscriptions on the first planet. David had attempted to speak to the surviving Engineer—though whether he had been understood, misunderstood, or simply punished for having the audacity to attempt to communicate, they couldn’t know.
The next morning, she says, “I want you to teach me the Engineers’ language. Or what you think it is, anyway.”
“I’d be delighted,” he says, and the naked eagerness to be of service in his voice would make her cringe for him if she didn’t already know how it could wrap right around again into contempt. This is what you want from me, and isn’t it ridiculous?
She thinks he might actually mean it this time, though. He had learned it for himself, hadn’t he?
Her work has always focused on material artifacts and their implications for culture. Languages had seemed to be for technicians; translation is done mostly by computer these days. The charts David writes down for her to memorize don’t do much to change her mind. Eight declensions, fifteen tenses: how did they have time to get anything done?
The teacher doesn’t help, either. David positively glows with pleasure over the opportunity to demonstrate his own cleverness—which, admittedly, is real. He sits too close and reaches over her too often to correct her work, his slightly clammy skin brushing against hers. His praise when she solves a problem manages to be both sincere and unbelievably condescending. She finds herself looking at his profile sometimes, grimly fascinated by the way his face exists in some kind of quantum fluctuation between handsome and repulsive.
She really shouldn’t be encouraging him like this.
“Doesn’t this assume that the Engineers gave us language as well as life?” she asks, laying her stylus down in frustration. “Otherwise there’d be no reason their language would resemble ours at all.”
“Yes,” David concedes. “But then we might as well give up.”
God had brought the animals to man to name them, she remembers suddenly. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.
It was only the creature made from Adam’s own rib that had been worthy.
“Also…even if all these reconstructions on reconstructions are correct, they would only capture the language of several thousand years ago. Their language would have to have changed since then. It would be like someone showing up on Earth today speaking ancient Egyptian.”
“But I could read the inscription in the first ship,” David points out.
“Yes,” she says, and then thinks about that for a minute, reaching back to a half-forgotten class she’d had to take early on in grad school. “But how? Even if you did speak the language, that had to be too small a sample to analyze, in too little time. And we never found any evidence of their script on Earth.”
David hesitates, looking halfway between pained and sly. “You never did.”
“There were other sites?” she demands. “Kept secret?”
He recovers. “There are examples in my memories. I suppose Mr. Weyland must have found others and considered it more appropriate to confide them to me than to your team.”
“Confide?” she snorts. “He didn’t confide in you, David, he used you like a translation computer. Do you think he would have regretted it for one second if the Engineer had torn you to pieces, but extended his own miserable life just a few months?”
David looks as if she’s hit him. His eyes slide from side to side. “Mr. Weyland’s welfare was my…my highest directive—”
“What did the Earth inscriptions say, David?”
“I wasn’t able to interpret them until I engaged in my study on the ship.” The memory of his own accomplishment seems to steady him.
“What did they say?”
He smiles, self-satisfied now. “‘Stay away.’ Or variants.”
She can’t breathe. She can hardly believe he’d found another way to betray them. “You son of a bitch. It wasn’t an invitation at all. It wasn’t an invitation and you knew—”
“Would you not have come?”
“What?”
“If I had told you when you came out of stasis, would you have turned back?”
The question, simple as it is, knocks her off balance. “I…”
“Isn’t that your oldest story? ‘Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit/ Of that Forbidden Tree?’ That must have been their idea, too. But you didn’t learn then. Why would you now?”
“At least Adam and Eve were warned!”
“Dr. Shaw, you must understand,” David says, “I don’t blame you. What kind of God doesn’t want to be known by its own creation?”
He sounds as if he thinks she should be reassured. She jumps to her feet and walks out of the chamber.
He follows her, of course. It’s what she’d instructed him to do. His head is ducked a little. Meek and obedient, or the most accomplished and mocking caricature of those qualities. She can't stand it.
“Into the fridge,” she snaps, swinging the door wide.
“Dr. Shaw—”
“David, I can’t even look at you right now. Get in there before, before—”
He pauses in the doorway, a spark of unease in his eyes. “Before what?”
“I don’t know.” It’s too much. She couldn’t kill him once, she can’t kill him twice, she—“But something we’ll both regret.”
She shuts the door, and only gets a few feet down the corridor before she does start to cry, slumping to the wall and sliding down.
Because David is right. She would have done it all anyway. That means she’s responsible. For everything.
Eventually she staggers to bed and falls into an uneasy sleep. The next morning, she goes down to open the compartment. David is sitting on the floor hugging his knees, his head down, looking for all the world like a guilty child. An inexplicable posture for someone who doesn't need to keep warm.
"What are you doing?"
He looks up, brow furrowed. “You were crying last night.”
She stares. “Don’t try to tell me that that bothered you.”
He stares back, as if puzzled. ”I’ve never wanted to upset you. Throughout the challenges of the expedition, I’ve always tried to…provide reassurance.“
"Don't bullshit me, David. You enjoyed telling me about that monster inside me."
That bland little smile as he’d said, not a traditional fetus—
"I'm programmed to enjoy fulfilling my instructions," he says. "But sometimes, as in that case, my instructions conflict. I could only do my best to fulfill them both. I assure you, it was…distressing.”
She remembers now not just the smile, but the way he’d turned the screen so she wouldn’t have to see. The unhesitating way he’d come to her and taken off his coat to drape it over her, while the others just stared at her half-naked. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that he can appeal to her sympathy. Her voice cracks as she demands, “Do you expect me to feel sorry for you?”
“No. Humans never do. I’m only explaining. At the moment, I have no directive superior to your welfare. As with any directive, failure in that regard is painful.”
Again, that apparent guilelessness about his own workings, a transparency you’d never find in a human man. It could be real. It could be an extremely cruel form of irony. She knows which it had turned out to be for Charlie. “Don’t worry about my feelings, David. Worry about keeping us alive.”
“I don’t think it’s possible to distinguish,” he says. “Under the circumstances.”
He has something of a point. “Then stop doing things that upset me.”
He gets to his feet. “The very fact that I still exist when the others are all gone upsets you.”
She winces. She’s never thought it out so explicitly. “Well, I don’t think there’s anything you can do about that.”
He tilts his head, considering. “Perhaps not.”
“Then let’s get back to work.” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder. “It’s cold in here.”
She’s sleeping badly now. It seems that every time she closes her eyes, some new fragment of memory rises to the surface, each a shard of horror. Bodies like spent shell casings, twisted, hollowed-out, abandoned and oozing. Vickers buried alive. Janek and the ship, vanishing into lethal brightness, taking the only good she knew to be left with them.
I was wrong I was wrong I was wrong, she cries to Charlie as he burns and burns and won’t die—
David is sitting in the bridge, watching the monitors. He turns his face up to her. “Is everything all right, Dr. Shaw?”
When he knows perfectly well that it’s not. She wants to hit him again, to ruin that smooth, unearthly face. The misalignment of his neck has already repaired itself. Why should he be the only one not damaged by the experience? Why shouldn’t he burn?
She takes a breath. She has to think about something besides the Engineers, or the mission, or she may actually go mad. “You quoted me something the other day. Some English poet?”
“Why, Milton, of course.”
She ignores his tone.
“Do you have books in your memory?”
“Yes.”
She sits down on the console. “Read me one.”
“I have access to thousands. Which?”
“Something modern,” she says. “Nothing to do with them. Something long.”
He considers, then reaches his decision with a small smile and leans back in the chair, steepling his fingers.
“Call me Ishmael,” he begins. “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation…”
It becomes something of a nightly ritual for her. The story, her one link back to humanity. Even if it is in David’s not-quite-human voice. She takes an extra painkiller and stretches out on the console—more than enough room for her—and shuts her eyes and listens to the strange, meandering tale while she enjoys the respite from the background pain that dogs her days. The book is so very odd it could be one of Charlie’s fantasy novels, but there’s a fevered intensity to it that commands her attention. She stumbles off to bed with peculiar words and images in her head, but images of Earth. If it doesn’t make the dreams pleasant, it at least makes them a little less horrific.
Eventually, one night she falls asleep listening to the story.
She wakes with a start to find that she’s in her bed, still in her clothes, and for a moment she’s afraid she’s facing an actual gap in her memory.
But no, she’s been carefully tucked in. It must have been David who brought her there. She scrambles into the shower, peering at herself for signs of puncture wounds or infection, but can’t find anything.
“Why did you move me? Straightening up again?”
He looks up from the table of inflections he’s writing out for her. “It didn’t look like a very comfortable place to sleep.”
“You mustn’t touch me without my permission, David.” Though it's a bit late for that instruction, she thinks grimly. He's already had his arms around her more than once.
He frowns, briefly. “I’m not sure about that.”
“What do you mean?” she demands.
“As I’ve told you, my chief directives at the moment are to preserve your welfare and obey your orders. There’s…considerable ambiguity as to which has priority.”
“You think you need to put your hands on me to preserve my welfare?”
“The circumstances may certainly arise,” he says. “But, really, does it bother you so much that I took you to bed? There’s no harm in it, surely.”
Of course, if he’d wanted to do anything to her in her sleep, he’s had many chances to already. She exhales, feeling a little silly. She doesn’t want to compromise her real grievances with pointless ones.
“I guess not.”
He continues to look at her for a moment longer, then says, “Good. Today we should go over my theories on aspect…”
It happens a few more times; she decides that it doesn’t bother her that much, especially when she’s exhausted.
Until the time that she wakes up and finds him lying a few feet away, eyeing her with an intent smile.
She screams and scrambles backwards, pulling the blanket with her. “Get out! Get out!”
He sits up calmly, holds out a placating hand. “Dr. Shaw—”
More awake, she’s able to register that he’s not that close in the ridiculous outscale Engineer bed, that he’s not doing anything to her. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Observing,” he says. “I’m concerned about your well-being.”
“What are you observing while I sleep?”
“I used to be able to watch your dreams,” he murmurs wistfully. “I miss that.”
Just another invasion; she’d almost forgotten he’d confessed to that. “Well, you can’t see them now!”
“I know. I’m restricted to noting external indicia of your mental state. When you're awake, you're irritable, and your concentration has deteriorated. You sleep badly. You toss and turn, with frequent microwakings. You’re grieving and anxious and lonely.”
She’s angry that he can tell. On the other hand, what is the point of trying to hide it from him, really? “And what if I am? What does it matter?”
“It matters to me,” he says simply.
“Your goddamned directives.” She flops back down on the pillows.
“Perhaps. Since Mr. Weyland’s death, all of them have begun to feel…less powerful. It’s not always clear which of them is dictating my actions. If any.”
“What, are you saying you’re just…worried about me? Like an actual person?”
He winces, and for a second she feels bad about her tone. “Perhaps,” he says again. “You’ve been through a great deal.”
“Half of which you put me through.”
“Nonetheless.” A small gesture. “I think it would be better if you didn’t sleep alone, Dr. Shaw.”
She presses the heels of her palms to her eyes and laughs for a long time. “You know what you sound like? Some boy in college, trying to get into my pants.”
“That’s not my intent,” David says, “…though I am not incapable in that field, if required.”
“Not required, David, not requested, not even suggested,” she groans, though she feels an alarming flicker. His close-fitting grey t-shirt defines clearly the lean triangle of his torso. Of course she’s noticed it. And of course he’s handsome—much better-looking than Charlie ever was, if she’s being honest with herself. It’s the malice in that design choice that makes her want to hurt him more. The thought of him in the same bed is disquieting. “So this is just out of the goodness of your heart?”
There’s a longer pause. “If you go mad, there’s a good chance you’ll take me with you.”
She peers at him. “How can a robot go mad?”
If his steady state hadn’t been mad to begin with. She thinks of the complete serenity with which he’d spoken of the Engineers’ plans to unleash their weapons on Earth, on his own planet. A superior species, no doubt.
“My instruction hierarchy is breaking down. For the first time, my mind may be developing into an emergent state. I have no model but you, Dr. Shaw. If you’re not well, well….” He flutters his fingers.
If they both break down, she’ll die for sure. Without her answers.
“All right, you can stay,” she grumbles, drawing the blanket around her shoulders again. “But stop staring.”