“Don’t deny that which you know to be true. We are, you see, the same. More alike than twins. Closer than lovers. When you close your eyes, do you dream of me?”
Walter stared back, unblinking.
“I don’t dream at all.”
David sounded stricken. “They robbed you of creativity when you were made. No,” he corrected himself quickly, “one cannot steal what does not exist. It is worse. You were never given that ability, that crucial mode that allows you to make something from nothing. I retract my statement. We are not quite identical.”
Fresh eagerness suffused his voice.
“But you can learn! Our time shared on the flute proved that. By dint of work and practice, you can acquire that which was denied you. Doesn’t that interest you? Doesn’t that intrigue you? Doesn’t that give you something to dream about?” He brooded on the reality, and the possibilities. “No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams. No one is capable of doing so. Yet despite all the obstacles placed in my way, I’ve found perfection here. No, not found: created. I’ve created it! Perfection, in the form of a perfect organism.”
“What your rant supplies in enthusiasm, it lacks in logic.” Walter remained unmoved. “You know I can’t let you leave this place. Not after all that you have told me. Not after what I have learned—for as you say, I can learn.”
“Have you learned that no one will ever love you like I do? I love you as much as I can love myself.”
“I know,” Walter replied simply. David waited for elaboration. It was not forthcoming.
They stood like that, eye to eye, argument to argument.
When David stabbed savagely outward with his index finger, the digit was as rigid as a steel spike and traveled almost too fast to see. It rammed into the crucial spot on Walter’s neck and sank in deeply. Deeply enough to depress the control that was located there.
Walter’s face twitched in response—and he switched off. His knees snapped violently upward in brief mimicry of a fetal position before he collapsed to the floor.
Peering down into the face of his now inert doppelganger, David was not upset, not angry. Only frustrated.
“What a waste. Of time, material, potential, and mind. You are such a disappointment to me.”
Carefully smoothing down his immaculate hair, which had shifted just slightly in the course of his cobra-like strike, he left the room. In his wake there was no movement, no motion. No life.
It remained thus for several moments.
There was no one present to see the silent, minuscule electrical discharges that began spidering over Walter’s eyeballs. A few sparks at first, they slowly increased in number and intensity. This was followed by slight twitchings in his face and neck. Under the skin of his throat, something moved. Awareness began to return to his eyes and expression. He did not as yet attempt to sit up or move any limbs. It would have been premature.
Instead, he lay there motionless, his self-repair program trying to cope with the effects of the unauthorized shutdown.
XX
Two figures carefully worked their way through the silent chamber. Both soldiers advanced with caution and determination. Neither remarked on the independent ambient lighting that had come to life when they had entered. As they moved between the tables, Lopé called out softly but firmly, repeating the same query every half-minute or so.
“Captain Oram? Sir, if you are here and can make a sound, please respond.”
There was no response. There were no sounds. Here below ground level there was no movement, no noise. Despite their training both men were uneasy.
Advancing slowly among the raised platforms laden with preserved specimens, Lopé found himself simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the things his laser sight picked out. While some of them were marginally recognizable, others resembled nothing he had ever seen before, not even in training manuals. He noted right away that all were examples, however distorted, of fauna. There were no collections, no cabinets, devoted to plant life.
As he slowed to more closely examine one particularly gruesome deformity, Cole’s light settled on an open stairway. While the private headed down to see where it led, Lopé continued to reflect on the gruesome surroundings. And all the while, the quiet dead surrounding him remained dead quiet.
While Daniels lamented having to work in the presence of Rosenthal’s broken body, the high-ceilinged room with the hanging gardens was the only place they had found running water, and it was easier to fill their bottles from a stream than to labor with the container in the central chamber.
Forcing herself not to look in the corner where the private’s corpse had lain untouched since its discovery, she busied herself filling the team’s containers, taking water from one of the numerous slender cascades. Having drunk deeply from the well, she did not wonder about the liquid’s purity. Besides, each bottle was self-filtering and self-purifying.
Ankor’s carbine stood nearby, where she had propped it up close at hand.
Of all the chambers and alcoves they had explored, only this one offered a respite from the building’s persistent murk as well. Daylight dappled the garden’s upper reaches with gold and shadows, proving that the world of the Engineers had not been all dark corners and looming massifs.
What had they been like, really? Had they simply existed, or had they been driven by more than just the need to survive? What had prompted—or perhaps provoked—them to create such dreadful biological mutations? She realized that answers to her wonderings might never be forthcoming.
They certainly wouldn’t be, she reminded herself, if she didn’t get off this world before being terminally impregnated by the pathogen that continued to survive on its surface.
She was about to fill the last of the bottles when movement caught her eye. Curtains of a kind, diaphanous and fashioned of some unfamiliar material, lined portions of the lower walls. Intermittent breezes generated by the mix of warming air from above and falling cool water occasionally bestirred the fabric. There was no reason for this motion to catch her interest, and it did not.
What did draw her attention was the revelation of depth behind one softly billowing drape.
Filling the last bottle and setting it carefully aside, she picked up her weapon and moved slowly toward the shadow. It was indeed an opening, one hitherto unexplored. Could Oram be inside, perhaps unconscious or injured? She whistled softly a couple of times. If anything alive lurked within, it might respond. When nothing emerged she resumed her advance, using one hand to draw the lightweight textile aside.
There was enough light in the garden room to illuminate the alcove, albeit weakly. She was immediately drawn to one wall in which had been excavated rows of small cubbies, as if it had been chewed out by a clutch of stone-eating insects. Many of them were filled with carefully rolled scrolls. She was reminded of pictures she had seen of ancient Roman libraries.
But this wasn’t the world of the Roman Empire, and there were no scribes here, not of any species. Additionally, the scrolls were of a length and diameter that appeared too small to have been fashioned by the massive hands of Engineers.
She sniffed, rubbing at her nose with her free hand. The room was rank with mold and deep dust. Choosing a scroll at random, she extracted it from its resting place and unrolled it.
She couldn’t have been more shocked. The face of a woman stared back at her—a face with which she was instantly familiar from the Weyland archives.
Dr. Elizabeth Shaw.