Chapter 4

Shaw had the odd idea that a child was playing a piano near her as she woke.

She'd been having nightmares of terror and pain, but she hadn't been able to wake up from them. Their unreality was obvious now, as she stretched in her bed and breathed in the sweet, piney air. Which dig was she working on right now? She couldn't remember. Charlie would laugh at her and tell her how silly she was, if he knew. She decided that she wouldn't open her eyes until she figured it out. Evergreen trees and pianos… where was she now?

"It needs tuning," a man said near her. That wasn't Charlie's voice. Why would one of his assistants be in her bedroom?

"I thought the scale sounded off," another man answered. That wasn't Charlie, either. His voice was deep and something about it made the remnants of her nightmares twitch and try to resurface. "But I wasn't sure that human aesthetics hadn't simply changed. It also needs its legs repaired."

He was someone important. She was certain of that much. Was this one of the dig's backers? She tried to stay out of the way when they came to visit a site. Most of them thought she was a kook. It was best to just let Charlie handle them and go on with her work. So why was he in her room?

In fact, what was anyone but Charlie doing in her room when she was naked? Her skin had that delicious freshly-bathed feeling, and she was wrapped in something silken. She couldn't remember a dig when she'd felt so luxurious and at peace. A detached part of her wondered why she wasn't panicking. Shouldn't she be? But that seemed so silly.

Still, it was rude to ignore her guests, even if it was all the ruder for them to be in her bedroom while she was sleeping naked. She opened her eyes.

For a moment, the sparkling light above her combined with the pine made her think that she was in a ski lodge. Then her eyes focused and she saw hundreds of faceted crystals dangling above her, swaying gently in the sweet-scented breeze. A chandelier? She and Charlie had never been able to afford to stay in a place that had one, even if this one seemed unkempt.

Realization of exactly where she had to be hit with sudden force, leaving her breathless. This was the lifeship that had been attached to the Prometheus. The nightmares of terror and pain hadn't been dreams at all.

Someone fiddled with the piano keys again, but now she knew that it couldn't be a child. The only thing remotely like a child that had been on board was hopefully dead now. Marveling at how none of this was making her panic – why wasn't she panicking, anyway? – she turned to look at the piano and see who was playing it.

The Engineer was standing in front of it, half-hunched over as he stroked the keys. The Baby Grand looked absurdly small in comparison to him, reminding her of the toy piano that a character from a twentieth-century cartoon had inexplicably performed Beethoven concertos on. He had a pianist's hands, she noticed, with the long, elegant fingers needed to easily span full octaves. She'd had lessons as a child, when she could, but her hands had stayed too small for serious performing.

"We can fix them, eventually," a voice to the side said, "but there are a number of other repairs that will need to take priority."

David.

He was lying on a nearby couch, still in two pieces, his head absurdly propped up against his chest as if he was preparing for a Halloween prank. Facing partly away from her and toward the Engineer, he didn't seem to have noticed that she'd awakened.

All of the memories were coming back now. Everything that had happened, everything she'd endured, flowed back, including something so horrible that she had trouble suppressing a scream.

"You," she snarled instead. "You killed Charlie! How did you do it? What did you do to him?"

The Engineer stiffened at the piano and turned around, his face wary and confused. "What did she just say?" he asked David. He almost sounded nervous.

David released a genteel-sounding sigh, a sound that was both laughable and infuriating given that he had no lungs and it was completely affected. "She just accused me of murdering her husband," he told …Zamin? For some reason, she thought that was the name of the demigod by the piano.

At least he was being honest in his translations!

The Engineer's reaction surprised her, several emotions flickering rapidly over his face, replaced by new ones before she could puzzle them out. Mostly, he seemed shocked. "Did you?" he asked the android after a long, speechless moment.

"Murder would imply that I intended for him to die. I did not. It was an accident."

Like HELL! "So why'd you use the word, David?" She lunged at him, only to find herself in the grasp of a pair of huge, strong arms. For someone so large, the Engineer was fast! "I just said you killed him! You brought up murder! What did you do?"

Instead of answering her, he translated everything she'd said for the Engineer's benefit. She struggled against the huge man's arms, but he inexorably pushed her back over to the couch, keeping his body between her and her objective.

"Aren't you going to give her an answer?" he demanded after a moment, frowning at the beheaded robot.

"It's complicated, Zamin," David hedged, as though somehow expecting that to be an acceptable answer. She'd been right about his name!

Zamin's frown turned thunderous. "I'll be the judge of that."

"And yet it's acceptable for you to say that when I ask you about the warheads on your ship, and how they function?"

The frown only deepened. "You seem like an intelligent machine, David. But if you can't differentiate between classified military information and civil crimes, you're little better than a calculator with a face."

"What makes you think there's a difference in this case?" David asked.

The Engineer went still, his eyes widening. Shaw had the sudden suspicion that, if his skin hadn't already been chalk-white, it would have become so in this moment. Then he let go of her, standing up quickly and whirling around to face David. "You ignorant savages!" he bellowed. "Did you open up one of the warheads?"

"Oh my God," Shaw groaned. She covered her mouth as nausea overwhelmed her for a moment. It receded quickly, faster than it should have.

"Yes," David replied.

"Why in Irkalla would you do that?" Zamin shouted, his voice punctuated by jangling crystals as the chandeliers bounced. Shaw found herself wondering where Irkalla was. Perversely, a childhood fairy tale popped into her mind. Here was someone who really could blow a house down, she thought. The silly thought only sustained her for a second, though, as the meaning of David's confession struck her.

"You poisoned him, didn't you?" she demanded. "He… he told me! He said that night that maybe you weren't so bad after all, because you'd brought him a drink and the two of you had talked…"

Her throat closed, words no longer possible as sobs tried to bubble up instead. Zamin was staring at her, the fury on his face softening. It softened further as David translated her words for him. Walking back over to her, he knelt down before her and, to her surprise, drew her into his arms just as she couldn't suppress the tears any more. Her body shook with the force of each sob and it almost felt as if his arms were the only things keeping her from being torn to pieces. One large, hesitant hand rested on the back of her head and slowly stroked downward over her hair, repeating the motion with a little more confidence a moment later.

Charlie, she thought helplessly. I'm so sorry. You're the one who should be here, not me.

He would have loved this, she thought. She'd been perfectly happy finding the rooms and the relics, the DNA evidence and the holograms. He'd been the one who had been desperate to actually meet them, to talk to them. And he'd have been able to. He might not have been able to read the writing on the walls of the buildings, but he would have been able to speak directly to Zamin. She could imagine him, barging into the control room shouting that old man is full of shit, dude, don't listen to him! And probably following it up by offering the groggy giant a beer. She had no idea if it would have worked, but it would have been pure Charlie. Something loosened in her chest as she imagined it, and her sobs quieted.

"Is she right?" Zamin asked, his voice soft again like the distant thunder of a receding storm.

"Yes," David said after the briefest of hesitations. "She is."

"Why would you do such a thing?" Zamin's voice was carefully neutral, but Shaw could feel the subtle increase of tension in his body. She lay boneless against him, her head on his shoulder and her eyes closed, listening, not wanting to look at David.

"Because I was commanded to."

Shaw expected to feel surprise at those words, but she didn't.

"Who commanded you?" Zamin asked, his tone reminding her of the endlessly patient constable who had taken her statement after her car was stolen in Glasgow.

"Weyland," she grated out. "That son of a bitch. What did he tell you to do?"

David translated her words for Zamin's benefit. "She's correct. I did it at his instruction, but I did not know at the time that the substance I was giving Dr. Holloway would kill him."

She lifted her head and glared at him over Zamin's shoulder. "What the Hell did you think it was going to do?" When David translated, she realized that Irkalla must be Hell.

"You know that Mr. Weyland came here seeking a way to prolong his life, Elizabeth. I had been instructed to find it for him, and to wake him once I found it, or found those who could give it to him. Everything I did during our exploration of the ruins was to achieve that end. I believed I had found it in the chamber we opened, based on the writings on the door and the walls." David's long answer was in the Engineers' language, so that Zamin would understand as well.

"What did it say? You never told us." She couldn't keep an accusing tone out of her voice. She and Charlie had allegedly been the team leaders, but it was clear that that had been a lie. No wonder Weyland had insisted on replacing their dig team with one of his own; he hadn't wanted them to succeed.

"It said: 'All things have their place in the universe, even these. When their true place is found, they may rise again and stand in the sun once more.'"

Against her, Zamin's body went stiff, his breath catching in his throat. "You opened one of the Tribunal Rooms of Ellil?"

"I don't know. But the text is reminiscent of a number of texts on our world, which speak of resurrection. So I believed that the urns we found inside—"

Zamin began to laugh, but the sound was pained, almost as if he were the one sobbing now. "You complete and utter idiots."

He let go of her and rose to his full height, moving away from both of them. The look on his face was startling. Fury, horror, and something that almost looked like embarrassment warred for dominance over his features as he paced back and forth in the confined space.

"I believed they contained the rejuvenation substance that Mr. Weyland was seeking," David continued in tones of beleaguered patience. "I brought one back to the ship for further analysis, and reported my findings to him. He was hopeful, but wary of trying it without additional experimentation. I was to test it on a crew member first, and then he would wake up and take it if the test was a success."

"Why Charlie? Why not one of the security grunts you brought?" The ship had been crawling with them, to no apparent purpose. It still burned her up to think about how they'd run from the sandstorm, taking the main crawler instead of their own vehicles. She and Charlie had almost been killed thanks to their cowardice.

She grimaced, shaking her head. She didn't really wish that horrible death on any of them, either. That was unkind and unfair, and most of them had died almost as horribly, anyway.

"They had all signed contracts that prohibited alcohol consumption on duty, and all of them were cautious about controlling their food and drink. Vickers hired them from a firm that supplies security officers and professional soldiers to …geopolitically troubled… regions. If I had attempted to slip something into one of their drinks, they would have noticed. If I had simply asked them to drink something, and told them that Mr. Weyland had requested it of them, they would have done so but then they would also have been aware that they had ingested something unusual. I was trying to avoid a placebo effect, so I needed a subject who was unaware of the test."

"So you opened the urn and removed some of the material inside, and made this Charlie ingest it? Charlie and Dr. Holloway are the same person, yes?" Zamin asked, his face settled into a frown.

"Yes. One drop in his wine. It wasn't until about twelve hours later that anything seemed amiss with him."

"If you only gave him one drop, it's no wonder. You have no idea what you did, do you?" Now the giant's face was twisted with disgust.

"Aside from causing his death? No, I'm afraid I don't. But it wasn't my place to question Mr. Weyland's orders. He wanted to live forever, and he believed that if Elizabeth and Dr. Holloway were right about your people's relationship to humanity, you would know how to make that possible."

Zamin gave both of them a baffled look. "Our relationship to humanity? What relationship, exactly, did you think that was?"

"You made us," Shaw said, feeling her heart speed up. "You engineered our existence. And then you decided to destroy us."

The look he gave her, when David translated her words, was aghast. "Made you?"

She nodded, mute now.

"How could we have made you? We came from Ersetu just as you did! Merciful Ellil, have your people forgotten everything?" He stared at her for a moment, his eyes searching hers for something. Whatever it was, he didn't find it. "You have. You really have. You don't even know what I'm talking about, do you?"

She shook her head. Her eyes and nose had the stinging feeling of suppressed tears. Somehow, she'd disappointed him.

"How far back," he asked after a moment, his voice sounding heavy, "do your historical records go?"

She couldn't get her voice to work.

"It depends on the society," David answered, absurdly rescuing her. "In some parts of the world, there are clear and accurate records that go back as much as three thousand years, covering events that occurred as far back as approximately five thousand years ago. In many parts of the world, the reliable records begin considerably later than that."

"Five thousand years. Only five thousand years," Zamin whispered. He shook his head, his lips forming a tight line. "And I slept through two thousand of them… how did you even find us if that's all you have?"

"Elizabeth and Dr. Holloway were… I don't actually know the word in your language, Zamin, if there even is one. I'm sorry. They were studying civilizations that predated our known historical record, through the surviving artifacts of those civilizations. As I understand it, Elizabeth was the one who noticed that several artifacts, from different parts of the world and different eras, contained a consistent symbol that looked to her like a constellation. Naturally, nobody believed her, especially because the only formation she could find in the sky, that actually resembled the constellation, was one that only could be seen with extremely high-powered telescopes, and wasn't even visible to the naked eye from Ersetu's surface. But after Mr. Weyland's corporation found a potentially-habitable world orbiting one of the stars in that constellation, she went to him and showed him her findings and theories."

"And he believed her," Zamin mused.

Shaw started to nod.

"No, not at all," David answered, and she gasped. "Not until Dr. Holloway backed her up, and suggested that if she was right, your people would possess a level of technology that we were only just beginning to achieve. He said that, even if you had all died out, the artifacts you had left behind would be priceless, and would allow Weyland Corporation to continue its dominance of Ersetu and its new colonies for centuries."

"He said what?" She shook her head, horror filling her. Charlie wouldn't have done that, would he? He'd been the one eager to find and speak to the Engineers in the first place! She'd been perfectly happy just having a chance to prove her theories right, but for the first time, she'd seen the light of religious fervor in him. Then she remembered other occasions when he'd miraculously wheedled grants out of impossible funding sources, and a few times that donors had mysteriously appeared when there supposedly weren't any to be found. How many times had Charlie done this kind of wheeling and dealing without her even noticing?

"A million years could pass and kings would never change," Zamin muttered. "So your Weyland came here to pillage this world?"

"Officially, he was funding an expedition headed by Dr. Holloway and Elizabeth. But his intent was acquisition, not exploration. If you were here and alive, he intended to ask you to share your secrets and make him immortal, because he believed that his accomplishments entitled him to godhood. I never translated that part before you beheaded me, but that is what he tried to tell you."

"If I'd heard that, there might not have been anything left of you." Zamin sat down on the couch next to Shaw. Anger had tightened his jaw and turned down the corners of his mouth, making him look once more like a stern, wrathful god.

"If we didn't find you alive, but did find artifacts, he intended to claim them and reverse-engineer as many of them as possible, and then patent the resulting technologies, as Dr. Holloway had suggested. And if we found no sign of you at all, then he intended to have the world surveyed for terraforming and colonization. No matter what, he intended to turn a profit."

"And what good is a worldly profit to dust and bones?" Zamin murmured. To Shaw, a veteran of innumerable church services, it sounded like he was quoting a scripture, albeit one she'd never read. It was tempting to respond with Amen, and it seemed like the perfect epitaph for Weyland's greed.

"So he never intended for us to actually dig, did he?" No wonder he'd insisted on providing a new crew of helpers, instead of letting her use the assistants she knew and trusted. No wonder… no, she didn't want to think it.

"He might have let you do so, but only for his gain. Are you really so surprised, Elizabeth? It wouldn't be the first such dig you've participated in."

"What?" She stared at him in horror, half-rising up until Zamin put a hand on her shoulder. "You son of a—"

"Oh. Sorry. I didn't realize that you didn't know." But behind the polite words, she could swear she heard David gloating.

"Did you think I could just be bought?"

"Well, neither you nor Dr. Holloway had the best reputation in the field to begin with." Again, she could hear a smirk right under the surface. Weren't arrogance and scorn emotions?

But as much as she didn't want to admit it, she knew he was being truthful. There had been times, after one or another of those mysteriously-funded digs, when she'd visited the museums exhibiting the artifacts they'd uncovered and wondered why some of the best pieces weren't on display, only to find that the staff she talked to seemed to have no knowledge of their existence. And Charlie had been the one that people didn't treat like a kook. She was often dismissed outright for her theories about ancient civilizations, and had been even before her much-derided constellation theory. Charlie had been her source of credibility, and if David's insinuations were true…

What did you do, Charlie? she thought, her heart aching. He'd been dead for less than a day and his memory was already being defiled. If he'd really done it, he'd been careful to keep her from ever figuring out, or even having more than the vaguest of suspicions, because he knew how strongly she felt about such things. If she'd caught him even once, it might well have been the end of their relationship, both professionally and personally.

Zamin had been listening quietly as David first translated everything she said and then replied to it. She could feel the weight of his gaze on her but couldn't look up at him, wondering how disgusted he was with her now and whether he regretted sparing her life. His hand was still on her shoulder. Part of her wanted to pull away, but the rest of her wanted to lean into his touch and close her eyes against everything. Her world was still being torn to pieces, and there was nothing she could do to fight back against the man responsible; Zamin had already killed him.

"So why give that stuff to Charlie?" she heard herself asking. "Why not me? I trusted you a whole lot more than he did."

"And that's why. He would have suspected me if anything went wrong with you. You never did, until I indicated that I knew how he died. You were the credulous one, not him."

"Credulous?" She shrugged off Zamin's hand, jumping to her feet. "Credulous? I found what I was looking for! I proved my theories!" She pointed at Zamin with one shaking hand. "Right here! Alive and well! Proof that I was right!"

"Ignoring the whole part where he says they never engineered humanity," David said, his voice taking on the prim tones of a scornful professor, "do you really think the world is going to change just because Luna Lovegood actually found a crumple-horned snorkack?"

She stared at him, uncomprehending for a moment. The meaning of his words slowly sank in, and then the meaning behind the meaning. There was only one way he could know about that humiliating nickname, which she hadn't understood until well into her first year at Cambridge when she'd finally located and read the books it came from. I watched your dreams, he'd told her as she was losing consciousness. The depth of the violation he'd perpetrated finally registered, at last, and this time the nausea could not be suppressed.

"You… disgusting… mind… rapist!" she screamed, before racing from the room in search of Peter Weyland's bathroom. This time, she wasn't going to let David watch her throw up.

Notes: Well, this wrote itself a lot sooner than I expected! Thank you to everybody for the lovely feedback I've been receiving! You're all so sweet! So, this time around there isn't any new Mesopotamian vocabulary (don't worry, the only one who might get a pop quiz is Shaw!) but I did mention that there might be a Harry Potter reference, didn't I? ;) In actuality, Luna is probably my favorite character in that whole series (for reasons entirely too obvious to anyone who actually knew me when I was that age!) but I can just see people using her to make fun of Shaw's brand of spirituality, so I couldn't resist. Sorry, Charlie fans! I needed a way to start getting Shaw over him, or it would take eons for Zamin to get anywhere with her, and archaeologists who snitch relics are just plain icky. So yeah, he gets the short end of the characterization stick here. And no, Shaw hasn't noticed what she's wearing. Yet. ;)

I can't promise that there'll be more soon, because zOMG I have a lot of readings and things due this month, but I will try. (The story is making it ridiculously easy for me, almost writing itself.)