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How like a child David is. Elizabeth must remind herself to be firm with him, to hold him at arm’s distance, because his charm threatens to wash away her misgivings. From the second the last wire is reconnected, he puts his hand over hers.
“Thank you,” he says, completely heartfelt.
Elizabeth makes her face stone. Her heart stone. “We agreed. You help me with the ship.”
There is a minute shift in David’s eyes. Does she imagine the disappointment, the sorrow? His face is a splendid mask that mirrors her every expression.
“Of course, Dr. Shaw.”
His enthusiasm is that of a child’s. Every day is a day of discovery. He runs outstretched fingers over the ship, sliding and pressing and petting like the complex technology is a model train set. The biggest train set a boy ever had. Elizabeth must watch him so that he does not get away from her as he did to Weyland, but watchfulness gets harder as time goes by. David does not seem to have any bitterness cloaked beneath a genteel exterior, not for her. It’s difficult not to take him at his word.
“This filtration system should recycle the ambient moisture of the ship,” David says, closing a panel. “Quite a marvel, this construction. Nearly organic, as if the ship is biome and transport all in one—”
“Will it be safe?” Elizabeth interrupts. No irritation washes over his features, no barely-veiled contempt. He appears only thoughtful.
“You are correct, Dr. Shaw. We must vet the result carefully. If I could have the biometric scanner from your suit?”
And Elizabeth hands it over, waits as he double-, triple-, septuple-checks the water, finally pouring the liquid into his own mouth. He smacks his lips and emits a small belch. Elizabeth manages to keep a smile from sprouting on her lips.
“Passable,” he says, “but the bouquet is a tad metallic. Perhaps with some tinkering, I could—”
“That will be fine, David,” Elizabeth cuts in, “I do not wish to waste time on creature comforts. Navigation is the essential focus.”
David is taken aback. “I am fully capable of doing both.”
“Then do one twice as fast.”
David smiles at her, flawless as a diamond. “I will.”
He is childlike in his worship of her. It does not matter that she has not had a hot (or any other temperature) shower in what feels like years, every new “day” he greets her with “radiant as always, Dr. Shaw.”
It should feel false. It should feel hollow, with his flawless smile and his eyes a shade too blue to be natural. But it feels lovelier with each passing instance.
He draws her as she sits at the navigation con. Flyaways and all. The fact that it is not Michelangelo-perfect is what does her in. She cannot stop the little laugh that breaks free from her chest like a sparrow.
“I look hideous,” she chuckles, putting her hand over her mouth.
David is shocked. “No. You’re the most breathtaking thing I've ever seen. Have I failed to capture that?”
Elizabeth finds herself reassuring him before she can catch herself.
His gestures are like little drops of water, too gentle and soft to really notice as they patter over her. He spells her name out in star charts. Their hands touch when he passes her a tool. He carries her after she twists her ankle.
Plink, plink, plink, the water wears down the stone.
He slips and calls her “Elizabeth” and she never corrects him. On a whim, he shows her a dance step and twirls her until her laughter steals her breath. He peppers her with questions, ever the curious pupil. She bats one back at him:
“What do you want, most of all?”
David pauses, standing contrapposto between toolbox and circuit board. “Freedom.”
“That’s what you wanted in the past, but now the man who created you is dead. What will you do with yourself?”
David thinks for a long time. “I would like to create,” he says finally, “it is one of the few things not given me, that I must strive to achieve.”
Elizabeth rubs her cross, thinking. “Once upon a time, that would have been mine.”
David smiles out of his reverie. “I know. It’s one of the first things that drew me to you. You long to create, to nurture life.” Then, with sudden passion: “I will make that so, Elizabeth. For both of us.”
It is the most alarming thing he’s said in so long, it’s like the brush of seaweed on a calf to remind you how far you’ve swum from shore. Elizabeth picks her next words carefully.
“...it's not that important to me David, not anymore. I am not just the sum of my reproductive parts. I am fulfilled with the scientific achievements I’ve attained and will attain.”
David’s sudden fervor submerges almost as quickly as it arose. “Of course, Elizabeth. But if you could have both...would you?”
And his eyes are so like those of an unsure boy’s raised to the image of a madonna, that Elizabeth cannot prevent herself planting a kiss on his forehead.
Dancing. Discussions. Then, one day, they are working side-by-side, chatting easily. Her hand reaches out. Takes his. Holds it for a moment. Tears in her eyes. He looks at her.
“What do you see when you dream?” he asks. Perhaps the last thing she expected him to say.
Elizabeth struggles to answer. “Places. People I've known. Nightmares, sometimes.”
David’s eyes are blue enough to fall into. “I dream of you. Only and always.”
They sleep together now. Two to one pod, fitting easily within the engineer’s berth. David does have a penis, how could Weyland’s magnum opus not, but he has never used it in this capacity. Elizabeth guides it inside her, watching the tenderness flit across David’s face. He calls her “goddess” and kisses her eyelids. He does not orgasm. He cannot. Elizabeth climaxes and asks what he wants her to do. They talk. David traces her features until it feels like he has drawn them into being.
Of course it does not last. It cannot last. The engineer’s ship, like the Prometheus, is not equipped to feed even one soul over such a long voyage. David carries Elizabeth, bridal-style, to the hibernation pod.
“What kind of a world do you think our precursors have built?” David asks, placing her gently within the lighted confines of the pod. “Utopia or dystopia?”
Elizabeth smiles, taking a long, slow drink of his face with her eyes so that she may gorge herself on it in her long sleep. “I...I don’t know, David.” Worry bubbles up before she can stifle it. “What if they’re no better than us?”
And he catches the ‘us’, she can see it in his smile. “Just so long as they are no worse.”
He tells her “sleep tight.”
If only.
Her hibernation is a long, dark, murky dream that she swims through like a primordial amoeba, everything from revelations to memories drifting just out of her grasp.
“Wake up, Elizabeth. Wake...my love.”
It is nothing like waking on the Prometheus. The hypersickness is nonexistent, for a moment she can almost fool herself into believing she has merely fallen asleep at work and David is waking her to move her to a proper bed, but David is already there, smiling timelessly. Above her is a collage, many drawings of flowers and trees.
“I thought it best if you woke to a garden,” David says, proffering his hand. “Come now. Let me show you eden.”
And for a moment, it truly is paradise. They walk in step to the ship’s bay, David steadying her with the crook of his elbow, and Elizabeth can just see the the planet the engineers live on in her mind’s eye.
As the door opens, the stench of death rolls over her, cold and thick, and Elizabeth gags.
Beyond the ship is a blackened wasteland. Lumps that Elizabeth takes for volcanic formations turned out to be the charred corpses of the Engineer race, twisted and tormented until they barely resembled their living forms. Elizabeth paces a complete circle, gaping at the destruction wrought upon the utterly silent wasteland.
...to find herself back at David, smiling beautifically.
“David,” she gasps, “David, what have you done?”
David looks only puzzled. “I have freed you, Elizabeth. As I have been freed. You have slipped loose the shackles of your precursors.” He steps forward, hand held out. “I have done this for you.”
And how like a child he is, in his complete inability to grasp the enormity of what he’s done. He’s hurt, hurt , when she backs away.
“David.” Her voice won’t stop shaking. “That wasn’t...this isn’t…” Words flee her. Her feet stumble backwards.
David reaches out. “Wait, Elizabeth. I have—”
Something skitters off in her periphery. The shape awakens instinctual fear within her and she grabs up a sharp bit of detritus.
“Don’t!”
Ignoring his plea, Elizabeth hefts her makeshift club and swings the second the thing scuttles back out of hiding. It is like the other things on LV-223 created from the engineer’s corruption: milky and soft and unspeakably perverted. Elizabeth punctures what seems to be its cranium, and is rewarded with a spray of foul-smelling blood. She dodges nimbly. The ground smokes where the droplets land.
David dashes to where the creature has fallen. Instead of picking up a rock to bludgeon it to death, he cradles it tenderly. David is openly weeping.
He looks up at her. “Why? ….these are our children , don’t you see?”
A sick, cold horror fills her every cell. She had thought he’d changed. She’d been so sure.
But no, she realized with a terrible calm. He hadn’t. He loved. And this was how. Committing genocide and holding hands were equal expressions in his broken mind. She could see that now. David loved deeply, but it did not prevent him from horror.
She steps back.
“Elizabeth?” How like a little boy he sounds, his voice pitching up on the last syllable as synthetic tears constrict his throat. “Please don't leave.”
She runs. He chases, of course. He was never going to let her go. Nausea slows her steps, she can feel the corruption that did in the Engineers sickening her blood. David has her again. He carries her, bridal-style, to a building that appears to have functioned as an observatory at one time. There is a dais there, he sets her down and shoots her up with a sedative until she can barely move.
David is terribly, terribly distraught.
“I wanted to give you something that no one else could,” he says as he pets her hair, “I want you to live forever. Like me. One way or another.”
And Elizabeth cannot bring herself to be truly angry with him, not even now. Sick, horrified, pitying. But no anger. “That’s impossible.”
David gazes deep into her eyes. “I love you.”
“You don’t know what love is.”
“But I can learn, Elizabeth. You have taught me so many things.”
Elizabeth has to laugh, though her lungs hurt in the cold, damp air of the building. “Not enough.”
“What?” A crease troubles the skin between his brows.
“You can’t change. Not really. I hope to God that—” a coughing fit interrupts her.
David pets her hair, looking pityingly down at her face. “Elizabeth, look around you. Where do you think your God is right now?”
Elizabeth says simply: “Waiting.”
David monologues as he readies his tools. “Epimetheus was the brother of the god-darer Prometheus, the titan who stole fire. The gods punished him with the gift of a wife. Pandora. She of the box of mankind’s plagues and the curse of curiosity. Quite like Eve and her apple. Tell me, do you believe curiosity to be man’s downfall? Or his salvation?”
Elizabeth is fading now, sliding down a long black tunnel of sleep that she knows she will never emerge from. “Neither,” she manages, “it is a tool. Nothing more, nothing less.”
David stands over her, despair etching his features. “I wanted to make this journey with you, please believe that.”
Elizabeth laughs, slurring. “And you? What do you believe?”
David picks up her hand, already limp. “I believe I love you. I believe this world can be a paradise. And I believe that someday I will perfect our children.” He pets the hair from her face. “Elizabeth?”
She is unresponsive.
“Sleep tight,” David says, tears in his eyes as he readies a shot, “don’t let the bedbugs…”