Panacea
-:-:-
She floated in the shallows of consciousness. A sun the color of limes shone above, rays heating the waters and numbing her senses. Awareness lapped at her mind. Something revolved with an abrasive whirring. The sun passed over her, bands of yellow-green focusing on her stomach, then on her arms. The smell of something herbal, spicy. Hands caressed her throat. Warm, bare fingers. She didn't have the strength to push them away.
Tinkling links of a chain, a dainty weight lifted.
Her cross. He was taking it again.
"No, David!" She grabbed with hands that wouldn't rise. Tried to sit up with a body that wouldn't move. Her eyes opened to the sun in all its verdant glory. The hazy figure of David hovered above her, frozen, her cross swinging between his index finger and thumb.
"Disorientation. Alarm," he said as if reading a list of ingredients. "Reactions triggered by a previous memory of similar circumstances. Must appease and calm. The biologic capsule is calibrated for organic only. The symbol of your deity won't go far, Elizabeth, I promise."
He slid from sight like a reflection from water, leaving her wondering if he had been there at all.
Something retracted from her. Her surroundings went dark. She blinked the bright splotches away and tried to make sense of where she was. The raised sides of her bed flared in elegant ripples around her, blocking the rest of the room from view. She lay on something...gelatinous. The temperature of the substance matched her body, giving that eerie feeling of suspension. Slight sensations of fluid oozing around her toes. No feeling from her other extremities. Nothing obeyed her commands to move, to flee.
David muttered in the Engineer language somewhere to her right, pressing symbol panels with such precision and celerity the chimes seemed to play a discordant tune.
Movement above her. She stared with stunned stupidity, details filtering in so fast her brain couldn't keep up. Folds of fleshy coils the color of aged ivory. Black eyes of the Engineers glowered from slanted ridges between the coils. Tawny light shimmered inside them, then flared bright as the sun in her dream. They descended from the coiled maw and became a bridge that passed over her multiple times, rims around the eyes spinning clockwise and counterclockwise. She squinted at them - then at her bare breasts quivering along with her thready breaths.
"DAVID!"
He appeared on command, startling her. The scanners created a nimbus of glinting light around his head. Paler than normal, his eyes bright, almost feverish. Moisture beaded on his cheeks and forehead as if he'd been sprayed by something.
"Tone of voice indicates panic. I wish you hadn't woken so soon, Elizabeth. Now I must explain, comfort, and reassure. We don't have time for that."
"You make time! Tell me what happened, where's my suit?"
"Embarrassment of nudity. Understandable. I had to laser it off. The capsule needs full access to your injuries, and that requires me to manually recalibrate the default settings. It's getting angry with me – and with you for not being nine feet tall and male."
"This is their medpod? But why can't I move? Why can't I feel anything?"
"Questions and more questions. The anodyne keeps you stationary and relieves your pain. Your injuries range from moderate to mortal. Mild concussion. Anemia. Extreme malnutrition. Dehydration. Acute abdominal abscess. Blood poisoning. Shattered humerus. Fractured ulma. Fractured radius – and yes, all my fault. Directly. Indirectly. I'm so sorry, Elizabeth." His sudden bark of laughter jolted her, as did the wild gleam of his eyes, the stark tension of his face. "Yes, of course I am. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to, oops, my apologies – just words, just words and they don't mean anything. Mr. Weyland says action matter. What people see. Promises not stored, but delivered and signed for."
Gone again. She strained to see him past the scalloped rims of her prison and soon-to-be-coffin. He abandoned all pretense of appearing human, using his reflexes and agility to full potential. Like an agitated bird, he darted from console to console, pecking at symbols with his hands and craning his neck at holograms of her body. Gloom obscured the rest of the room. Ridges and ovals of the architecture darkled a mossy green where the hololight reached.
She dropped her head, her neck muscles twitching with fatigue. The eyes and coils above blurred into each other, and shadows crept along her vision. Her stomach began to ache. She gave it a bleary glare. David had removed the staples at some point. The incision gaped open like a drooling smile, drainage seeping into the amber fluid around her. A deep pulsing sensation gathered force in her arms and pushed outward. Pressure from the back of her head traveled to the front of her skull and squatted there like an invisible frog, heavy and indifferent to how it made her eyes water and temples throb.
The black eyes retreated into their coiled nests, taking the putrid sunlight with them. She welcomed the darkness in their wake. Water lapped at her again, serpent-shaped clouds slithered over each other in a moonless sky.
David shimmered in her vision like a blond mirage, his head angled and brown eyebrows knitted. A droplet the color of diluted milk trailed down his cheek. Realization of what it was shocked her back into awareness.
"Oh no, David, you're...sweating hydraulic fluid."
He wiped his cheek with one finger and studied it until his concentration gradually morphed into a daze. His expression of wonderment turned catatonic. He swayed as if ready to faint, eyes glazing over.
"The universe is an endless cage," he said in monotone to his raised finger. "The light is gone."
"What does that mean?" No response from him. Not even a blink. "David? Answer me. Why did you say that? Look at me, please. David, look at me – Damn it! I said look at me!"
A birdlike tic of his head and his eyes snapped to hers. A tenuous strand of black joined the white trickle leaking from his nose. He wiped it with his hand and smeared the excess on his SE suit. "I'm not doing a very good job in keeping you calm, am I?"
"No, there's something very wrong with you, something broken. Let me out of this capsule. Find something else I can try. You don't even know if you can operate this – or what it will do to me."
"Suspicion. Fear. Identify cause and seek resolution. There isn't another alternative. If I can fly this ship, I can program a simple healing device. There's no reason to doubt my abilities."
"I wouldn't if you were fully repaired, but you're sweating your own fluid, David. You're babbling nonsense."
"Everything I have said has been relevant, and my repairs are secondary to saving your life. That said, the biologic capsule is ready now. I'll begin the initial sequence."
"NO!" The pain in her arms seethed and roiled. The frog sitting on top of her forehead gained another twenty pounds. "Get a salve for my stomach, or an...antibiotic in...in whatever they bloody use for a cabinet! Find something else. Use something else! I don't care if you have to use your own fucking arm for a splint! Get me out of this blasted thing!"
She bleated when he clamped his hands on the capsule rim, quailed when he snarled in her face. "Stop being afraid! Stop it! Don't you understand how uncomfortable it is to look at you? Your expression contorting, your body shaking, tears and mucus running down your face? I have to react to that. Display the appropriate emotion, counter with the proper reaction!"
Again that tic of his head, his entire body a rigid wire. He closed his eyes, simulated breath heaving, his voice trembling. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, please. What am I saying? Of course you're afraid. This is an alien ship with alien technology that is strange and frightening. Please add my insensitive outburst to your list of grievances I must amend later with actions not words."
"David, stop! This capsule could kill me!"
But he fled from her to unknown parts of the room. More buttons fluted in disharmony, a purring sound, then the elevator sensation of rising. "Patient ready for first phase," he said over the trilling roll of machinery. "Administering anodyne."
Something jabbed the back of her neck. Instant headiness. Her tongue swelled in her mouth, kept her from crying out. The frog leaped away from her head. Her abscess reduced itself to a dim twang. Her arms tingled instead of throbbed. The black eyes pulled into the coils and the coils unwound themselves. Folds of flesh, transparent and soft white. The insides of an oyster.
Rims on both halves flared and reached for each other. The capsule above slanted, then angled downward. She lay drowsing and unafraid, David's voice gliding to her just before the shell sealed around its pearl.
Please live.
-:-:-
She walked barefoot in a desert of lavender sand. Her sleeveless white dress flowed to her calves, tamed at the waist by a corded beige sash. The sky belonged to someone else. A giant white moon tried to smother a smaller, purpler, version of itself. Galaxies twinkled beyond the moons, hinting new life and death.
A city lay in ruins around her, magnificent even in its decay. Spun glass of red and gold glittered on her path. Accents of topaz and once ornate carvings on domes and keyhole gates. Bones half-buried in sand guarded opened doorways and collapsed buildings of marbled brown stone. Almost human, but with strange sloped heads, wide eye sockets. And smaller ones. Children.
Beyond a sculpted archway of the same marbled stone, statues four heads higher than hers held their hands to the sky. Five fingers. Five toes. Native garb of feathers and beads. Jewelry, headdresses. Webs without spiders draped between the statue bases, sand their only prisoners.
The end of all things is the beginning. What will be can never come.
A woman's voice. The bubbling swell of the ocean, the call of some throaty bird. It made her think of her mother. She touched her hair, remembering gentle fingers braiding it, a flower tucked just so.
Two paths. Enlightenment or death. Choose.
And she did. The small opening in the wall leading to stairs that descended into a oval room that appeared to have been a bathing chamber once. Darker here, webbing strung over the ceiling, the walls, coated the empty basin with molded swathes of silk. Several large chrysalises lay at the bottom of the basin, cellophane membranes unpeeled. No butterflies in sight.
She turned toward another broken wall. Webbing thicker here, but she found a gap and slipped through. The hall became a throat, the sense of danger and someone watching. Echos of screaming, panicking and dying. Husks of captured prey littered the floor and hung from the ceiling. Bodies split. Familiar ways to die. She rubbed her stomach, remembering.
Source is corrupted. Harvest flawed. System wide failure. Purge imminent.
Another room. This one spacious, a hole for a ceiling that tunneled toward the sky. The purple moon peered inside, bathing everything in shades of dusk. Nothing remained of the room's previous structure. Webbing had changed the interior into a hard and fibrous plexus.
The voice cries to nothing and nothing answers. What does not exist cannot hear.
The source of the voice splayed before her, wings stretching the entire length of the wall. A cybernetic angel. Androgynous, pose reminiscent of the shrine god, same cresting skull and frail arms, hips and legs tapering like the tip of a dart. Dorsal fins looped around its shoulders and fused to the wall. Coils and tubes created the rest of the wings, parts of them merging with its body – elegant rill lines along its hips, waist, neck; jutting ribs and a hole where its heart should be, edges smooth and stained black.
Awash in lilac moonlight, its skin shone with a dusty translucence, as if it had been on display for centuries. Shadows covered its face, stirred with its breath.
It breathed.
She came closer, heart hammering away in her ears. It lived, it spoke, but was it real?
The moon shifted. The light changed. Its face – a woman's face – revealed itself under her outstretched hand. Sloping forehead without brows. Wide, jutting cheekbones, small chin resting on her chest. Cordate lips compressed, features strained as if in pain. Large-set eyes closed, but rolling movement beneath.
It - she dreamed.
Her hand hovered over the angel's face, shaking. A sense of trespassing now, of touching something sacred, forbidden, but she couldn't turn away. She had to know, she had to -
The universe is an endless cage. The light is gone.
The voice drove away the moon and the light, and sorrow flowed into her, a cold, bitter river that snatched away the face of her mother, her father, Charlie, everyone in life that had been dear to her. It left behind every loss, every moment of pain and anguish. Her mother's closed casket, her father's bloody gasps, Charlie's screams. It left behind emptiness, the twisted-knife ache of abandonment.
There is nothing, there is nothing, there is nothing –
The voice ricocheted in her head, an enraged buzzing thing that tried to cleave its way out of her. Black fluid dribbled from the angel's pressed lips, from the hole in her chest.
She fell to her knees. Charlie wouldn't stop screaming. Her father wouldn't stop dying – but she clung to the barest thread of hope. Light still shone. It always shone. It wasn't gone.
"No, you're wrong! It never left, and I know it hears you - I can hear you."
Everything stopped. The voice. The air. The river of sorrow.
The angel lifted her head, eyes flaring open. So blue. There wasn't a shade like it anywhere in the universe. No deepest ocean, no brightest sky, no flawless sapphires, or glimmering twilight could come close.
This blue didn't exist - and it was divine.
The angel pinned her with this fathomless gaze, dissected her piece by piece, burned away every layer of herself until it gazed unblinking at her exposed soul. The angel twitched her head, the gesture so like David that it brought his face, his gleaming hair, his childlike malevolence. His image became a shield to cower behind, to keep her soul from being shredded into nonexistence.
The angel shrieked.
A plinking sound of a windowpane cracking, then breaking. In the dark, chittering growls, knives scraping on the floor. Something wet bumped her leg, then grabbed it, talons sinking. She screamed, scrambled forward. The angel offered no sanctuary. Pitiless eyes judged her, the blue narrowing to a vibrant crescent before winking out.
And leaving her alone with them.
They sank their teeth into her flailing limbs, but she felt no pain. The room brightened with a green sunrise. The dark creatures scattered. The webbing dissolved around slanting ridges and contour tubing. Her dress disappeared, leaving her naked and chilled. Something long and viscous clogged her throat and packed into her lungs. Coughing didn't clear it. Neither did thrashing on the floor.
Someone took her flopping hand, turned her over and thumped her back one time - hard. She gagged, then vomited a stream of amber fluid.
She took a deep, gurgling breath, and then retched again. Brown sludge clouded the fluid, a mesh-covered drain sucking it down like mud. The surface beneath her had the velvety-grip texture of a bath mat. A hand plucked the tendrils of hair sticking to her cheek and stroked her back as if she were a cat.
"Your body is purging the infection, Elizabeth. It will pass," David cooed in her ear. He laid her on her side, his fingers slick from the layer of fluid coating her body. She concentrated on one breath at a time, astonished that she breathed at all. Alive and whole and nothing hurt. Weakness, hunger, and thirst, yes - but not dying. Not anymore.
"Let's get you cleaned up, shall we?"
A low musical chime and water hit her. Nothing in heaven could compare to that sensation, to that temperate and perfect pressure of something else besides body fluids and alien goop smacking her skin.
David bathed her with the same attentiveness he had given Peter Weyland's feet. Slow, back and forth passes over her backside and shoulders, massaging those spots where bits of stubborn gunk clung. Globs sluiced away, freeing her like a sculpture from a mold.
He coaxed her onto her hands and knees, and she shivered in that position like a newborn fawn. He doused her scalp, lifting sections of her hair, running his fingers through it until no slime remained. Everywhere the water went, his hands followed. He spared no part of her, shushing her surprised mewl when he sprayed between her legs. His hands went there, too, flushing every crevice and secret place. She watched the drain, her face on fire, tears slipping to mingle with the swirling brown foam.
He emanated no titillation or pleasure from his task, but there was an intensity to his movements, a sort of predatory reverence that made her stay very still. She was suddenly glad she couldn't see his expression.
Only when he proceeded to the final rinse – broad sweeping gestures without his touch – did she feel safe enough to voice the desire she could no longer contain.
"David, please. Thirsty."
"Yes, of course."
Another chime and the spray head – a fanned cobra spitting from rows of tiny oval mouths – appeared before her. She shoved her face into it, guzzled and gulped as much glorious cold water as she could before David took it away.
"Not too much, or I'll have to put you back into the capsule. Don't worry now, there's plenty more, and some food that I've found." He pulled her onto his lap. Tranquil concern in his drawn mouth and canted head, no evidence of the mania that had gripped him before. Gray uniform sopping wet, his hair dripping, yet he seemed content. And when he smiled at her, he was again the David she had first met.
But there was something different about his eyes. Same color, same blend of childlike curiosity and canny perception, but now they also held awareness. She had glimpsed it in the transport before Weyland had entered. And perhaps several times before that. Moments of reckoning, a sentience transcending programming, wires, and circuits – a doll coming to life.
She dropped her eyes to his collar. No bulges. No bumps in the cloth. No evidence at all of the tattered mess that had been his neck. He must have seen the question in her expression because he deflected hers with one of his own.
"Did you dream, Elizabeth?"
In her mind, the angel hung on the wall like a discarded puppet, her heart torn out, her body twisted and tortured. Blue eyes condemned - but the voice, such grief.
"No."
He nodded, his expression unreadable. "Just as well, I suppose. I doubt they would have been very nice. Let's get you dried off and into bed."
He carried her bridal style toward a mottled green and black slab that extended from the wall. She peered over his shoulder at the biologic capsule that had saved her life. She had been right about the oyster comparison. It spiraled from the floor as an enormous polished mollusk shell, its base a massive network of cables woven into the circular platform beneath it. Its innards glistened from fluid the upper shell still salivated. The nacre of its lower half shone dark orange. A number of pearl-like buttons rode the ridge lines, each pulsing a dim green.
"Wonderful isn't it?" David set her down and reached for a bundle of cloth on the floor. "Something that preforms miracles should be grand."
She didn't reply. The insanity of where she was, what she sought, and her only companion on this one-way journey started to overwhelmed her again. David had caused this mess, but he had also saved her. He didn't need her for anything, so why had he been so desperate to see her survive? And yes, it had been desperation - everything from his actions to his reactions had practically screamed it. Had it been a malfunction? Some aberration in his programming? Maybe he thought of her as a substitute Weyland, some frail thing he had to coddle and care for.
To calm herself, she touched the material he patted her down with, rubbing her thumb over the soft quilted weave. "You found blankets?"
"Of a sort. They're actually robes. I discovered them in a storage room near that little temple you seem to like so much." He tugged the damp robe gently from her hands and replaced it with a new one. "I've shortened this with a utility knife, but I'm afraid I can't do much about the collar. Needles and thread are in short supply on a war ship – as are underclothes. This will have to do until I can find something else."
Lightheaded and embarrassed by his doting, she bundled herself into the robe. Scents of sage and chamomile with a touch of sour mustiness. She hugged it tighter and imagined it flowing around an Engineer's body, how it would sway when he walked, how it would drape over his powerful shoulders. And here she was, his unwanted creation, wearing his clothes and trying to understand him. His motivations, his contempt for humanity.
"Rest now," David said. He arranged her hood so it drooped over her eyes. "I'll return shortly with what you need."
She murmured at him, her eyes already closing. She didn't want to think about David or his clandestine motives. She didn't want to think about his hands and how they had moved over her body, tender and insistent. She still felt them now, trailing over her shoulders, spreading her legs so he could have access.
She pressed her thighs together and curled into a tight S. Her fingers twisted a ring that wasn't there.
Her thoughts cast themselves adrift. The thrum of the alien ship changed to a sighing wind. Two moons battled for dominion over the sky, but their war faded in the light of three small suns. The Engineer walked in the desert of her dream, regal in his robes and posture. The ruined city stretched before him, now restored to its former glory. Awestruck natives replaced the dead, and excited children threw yellow flower petals in the Engineer's path. Their parents bowed, food and gifts offered. There was celebrating. Dancing. Singing.
But one woman stood apart from the rest, her eyes an unnamed shade of blue. A sense of sadness as she watched the others, a sense of dread for what would come.
The universe is an endless cage. The light is gone.