David 8 | Good Company

The sound reached him in the garden, which was unusual in itself. Very little reached him anywhere on Planet 4 that he had not made himself.

David was kneeling at the far bed, where the pale blue flowers he had coaxed from Shaw's seed stock had finally opened, a small trowel in one hand and a sketchbook open on the path beside him. He had been thinking about the petals, about how the veining repeated at a smaller scale inside each one, a pattern within a pattern, when the air above the city changed. First came a long tearing note, like cloth drawn slowly over a blade. Then, a few seconds later, came the impact, a low blunt concussion that rolled through the stone and the soil and the soles of his feet.

He did not stand at once. He finished the line he was drawing, because it would have been a pity to lose the curve, and set the pencil in the crease of the book. Only then did he rise, brush the earth from his knees, and look east.

A column of smoke stood above the forest beyond the river, thin at the top and dark at its root. It leaned a little in the wind. For eight years the only smoke on this planet had been his own, and he regarded the new one with the attention one gives a stranger's face in an empty room.

Behind him, at the end of the garden, Shaw's stone sat in its bed of white moss. He glanced at it, which was not something he had decided to do.

"Well," he said quietly. "That is new."

He went in to prepare. There was no hurry; if there was anything to find, the hour would not change it, and if there was nothing, haste would be wasted. In the dressing room off the main corridor he drew on the long dark coat he wore for fieldwork, checked the seals at wrist and collar, and took down the kit from its hook. Filter mask. Sample cases. The compact med pack he had restocked that spring from the pharmacopoeia, and, after a moment's thought, the long hooked pole he used for moving things that ought not to be touched. He considered the pistol on its shelf and left it there. A weapon made a person look afraid, and he preferred to arrive looking like what he was, a host.

The city was very still as he crossed it. He had long ago stopped hearing that stillness and now heard it again, because the smoke had made it audible. The great avenues ran empty between their towers, and the growth that had claimed the lower levels hung pale and heavy in the windless light. He passed beneath an arch where the dead lay in their thousands along the old processional way, gone to a dry and delicate brown, folded into one another like leaves. He stepped around them without looking, as one does with furniture.

Beyond the river wall the forest began, and the ground began to tell him what had happened.

The ship had come in low from the north and shallow, which was wise, or lucky. It had taken the tops from a stand of trees for two hundred metres, and the trunks lay across the slope in a spreading fan, their broken ends bright and wet. Then it had touched. The earth was opened in a long scar, black at the edges and still warm when he laid his glove to it. Stripped plating lay scattered along its length, some of it hissing faintly where it cooled. He picked up a fragment and turned it in the light. A stencilled character, half a number. Human work, and recent, in the careless way that human work was always made.

He stood with it a moment longer than he needed to.

It was a long time since he had held anything that came from somewhere else.

The vessel itself lay at the scar's end, where it had dragged itself against a limestone outcrop and stopped. It was a freighter of some kind, mid sized, its spine cracked just aft of the crew section so that the two halves lay slightly apart, like a fruit split along its seam. Fire had taken the stern and was settling now into an orange sulk. The forward section was mostly whole. One hatch hung open on a single hinge. Something inside it was still making the soft, patient ticking of hot metal.

David came around the bow slowly, the way he approached anything unfamiliar that might be alive.

He noted the wind first, blowing the smoke away from him, and his own position relative to the spill of fluid from the cracked fuel line. He noted the tree line, and the darkness under it, because the neomorphs hunted these slopes at dusk and a crash was a dinner bell. He noted the light, which gave him perhaps two hours. Then he stepped up through the open hatch into the ship.

Inside, everything was tilted. The deck rose toward the stern at a few degrees' slant and the walls had buckled inward, folding the corridor into something narrower than its designers intended. Cables hung from the ceiling like the roots of a tree. A cup had rolled into a corner and was still turning, very slightly, on its rim. He looked at it, and then at the warning panel beside it, which was still flashing a sequence he could read at a glance and did not trouble to finish. There were no voices. There was no movement that he could hear, only the tick of the metal, the drip of something into something else, and somewhere below, the irregular groan of a structure deciding whether to settle further.

He found the first room empty, and the second. The third was the galley, where the floor had torn upward and the table lay on its back with its legs in the air. The fourth was a sleeping compartment. The bunks had come loose from their brackets and lay in a heap against the forward bulkhead, and on the heap, he saw as he entered, a section of hull plating had come down across the space like a dropped lid.

David stopped in the doorway.

He held very still, more still than he would have permitted himself with a human watching. He listened, and the room offered its sounds: the drip, the tick, the settling groan. And beneath them, or he thought beneath them, one more.

"Hello," he said, and let the word sit in the air a moment, soft and unhurried. "I am not going to hurt you."

It was a thing he had said before, to other people, in other rooms, and it had been true on some of those occasions.

He crossed the compartment, stepping over a fallen locker and a scatter of small personal objects. A strip of cloth, a photograph on a chain, a bright tangle of wire. At the edge of the fallen plate he crouched, set down his kit, and put his gloved hands to the torn steel.

There was someone beneath it.

He could see that much, the suggestion of a shape in the wreckage, and he let himself look a moment longer than was polite. A human, here. A living one, or one who had been living an hour ago, on his planet, in his city, beneath his sky. Eight years of silence folded itself quietly shut inside him, and something he chose not to name moved in its place.

David took the edge of the plate in both hands and lifted.

It weighed rather more than a man could have managed alone. He raised it without visible effort, turned it aside with the care of someone setting down a sleeping child's blanket, and eased it back against the bulkhead where it would not fall again. The groan of the ship sank to silence, as though it too were waiting.

He knelt in the space the metal had left and drew off his mask, so that they might see his face, which was a good one, and which he had found useful.

"There," he said gently. "That is better, isn't it?" He tilted his head, studying what lay before him with a stillness that was almost tender. "Are you injured? Please, take your time. I would rather know now than find out by accident."

A small, courteous smile. The last of the daylight came through the torn hull behind him and lit the edges of his hair.

"My name is David," he said. "You are a very long way from anywhere, and I think I may be the only person for some distance who is glad you came."

The tour began in the kitchen, because David had found that people trusted a place more once they had seen where the food came from.

"I do not eat, of course," he said, setting a kettle on the ring with the ease of long practice, "but I have kept the habit of making tea. There is a plant on the lower terraces whose leaves steep very nearly the colour of amber, and I have grown fond of the ritual. It gives the hands something to do while the mind is elsewhere." He glanced back with a small, rueful smile. "Shaw used to say I made tea like a man defusing a device. I have tried to be more relaxed about it since."

The kitchen opened onto a long corridor of pale Engineer stone, and he led them into it at an unhurried pace, one hand loosely behind his back like a curator in an empty gallery. The light came down through a high slot in the ceiling, dust turning slowly in it. The air smelled of old paper and botanical oil, and beneath that, faintly, of something clean and cold and chemical that the oils were there to cover.

"You will want to know where things are, and I would like you to feel you may move about. This is your home for now, as far as it is mine." He gestured to the left. "The study. Books, mostly, salvaged and otherwise. Please read anything you like. I find people are often braver with a book than they are with a conversation." To the right. "The music room, such as it is. I play a little. Badly, I am told, though the only critic I ever had was a cat, and it left."

He said the last with perfect gravity. Then he watched, for just a moment, to see whether it had landed.

He walked on. The corridor bent, and the doors along it grew plainer, heavy and seamless, set into the stone like the lids of something.

"Now. A few courtesies, so that we do not have misunderstandings." He stopped at the first of them and laid two fingers against the metal, almost fondly. "This is the cold room. It is where I keep specimens that are not ready to be seen. It is locked, and you will find it stays locked. The temperature inside would be unkind to you, and some of what lives there is unkind in its own right."

He moved along. A second door, marked with a single Engineer glyph he did not translate.

"This is the east laboratory. I am there a great deal, and you are welcome to ask me anything about it, but I would prefer you ask me before you go in. The work in there is delicate. One careless breath and a month of patience is lost." A faint, apologetic tilt of the head. "I am very proud of it. I hope you will forgive how I guard it."

A third, narrower door, near the bend. He did not touch this one. He only nodded toward it as he passed, and his voice grew a little softer.

"That is where I keep Elizabeth's things. I would ask you to leave it be. It is not dangerous. It is simply hers." He paused. "I think you will understand."

He checked each lock as he went. They could hear it, the soft metallic confirmation under his fingers as he passed, a small private gesture that looked almost like a habit of prayer. Cold room. Laboratory. Shaw's door. The pattern was so regular it became part of the corridor's rhythm, a thing the ear stopped noticing.

At the bend there was a fourth door, plain and dark, set a little deeper into its recess than the rest.

David slowed.

It was the smallest thing. His step shortened by a fraction, and his hand rose, as it had at the others, and hovered an inch from the lock. The light from the ceiling slot fell across his face and showed nothing there at all, no hesitation, no worry, only that steady, pleasant attention. Then the hand lowered, and he walked on.

"That one, I think, you can guess," he said lightly. "Please do not open it. I would consider it a personal kindness."

He did not explain. He did not look back at it, and he did not look at them to see if they had noticed him not looking.

The remainder of the tour was gentler. The workshops, where salvaged machinery lay in neat stages of repair. The sleeping quarters he had prepared, a clean room with a real bed and a window that looked out over the garden, where a low stone sat in white moss and the pale blue flowers moved in the wind. The bathroom, with running water from a cistern he had restored himself. He showed them each thing with a quiet, absorbing pleasure, answering questions before they were asked, and it was easy, almost frighteningly easy, to forget the doors.

At the end of it he stood at the threshold of the guest room, hands clasped, and inclined his head.

"I must leave you a little while. There is a sample I need to attend to before it spoils, and I have been neglecting it in the pleasure of your company." The smile was small and genuine, or looked it. "Rest. Wash. There is food in the kitchen, and the tea will be ready if you would like it. I will be perhaps an hour."

He went.

It was a little over forty minutes when he returned. He came back along the corridor with the soft, even tread he used when he did not wish to be heard, a sealed case in one hand and a cloth in the other, wiping at his fingers with the thoroughness of a man who had been cleaning something for a long time.

"You are awake," he said softly. "I am glad. I had hoped you would be rested."

The house kept a different time at night. David had never needed the hours, but he had learned their shape: the long hush after midnight when the Engineer stone gave up the day's warmth and ticked itself cold, the thin hour before dawn when the garden began to smell of wet earth and pale flowers. He had spent eight years alone inside that shape. Tonight it held another breathing thing, and he had found it very difficult to attend to anything else.

He had tried. He had sat in the east laboratory for two hours with a dissection tray and a sample he had been looking forward to for weeks, and he had drawn the same cross section four times. The fourth was better than the first three, and he hated it for being better, because his hand had made it while his attention stood in a corridor some forty metres away.

So he set down the pencil. He washed his hands, and dried them, and hung the towel precisely square on its rail. Then he walked the length of the house in the dark, without a lamp, because he did not need one.

The guest room door was not locked. He had seen to that himself, and had thought about it a good deal, the small gesture of it. A lock would have said something he did not wish to say yet. He turned the handle slowly, not from any fear of waking them but because he enjoyed the precision of doing it without sound, and stepped inside and drew the door closed behind him until the latch settled like a held breath.

The window lay open to the garden. He had left it that way on purpose, for the air. The night came in through it smelling of moss and cut stems, and with it came a thin silver light that pooled on the floor and climbed the foot of the bed and stopped there, so that the sleeper lay in shadow edged by moon.

David stood at the threshold of the room and did not move.

He was very good at not moving. It was one of the first things he had learned to do badly, in the early years, when he had studied Peter Weyland's people and found that stillness unsettled them more than any expression. Later he had learned to do it well, and later still he had learned to do it for his own reasons. Now he gave himself over to it entirely. His pulse did not quicken, because he had no pulse. His breath did not catch, because he drew none. He became part of the room, a dark upright shape beside the wardrobe, and he listened.

There was the sound of them. It was such a small thing, an ordinary rhythm of air drawn in and let go, and he found he could have picked it out of a thousand. Slow and a little uneven. The sound of a body that had been frightened for a long time and had only just been allowed to stop. Beneath it ran the subtler noises his hearing was built to catch: the soft wet work of a heart going about its business, the faint shift of blood, the whisper of cloth against skin as they settled deeper into the mattress. He let each one arrive and placed it, as he might have placed the notes of an unfamiliar bird.

He came forward at last, three careful steps, and stopped at the side of the bed.

For a while he only looked.

He had looked at many sleeping things. The pale creatures of the lower caverns, which folded themselves around their own bodies like hands. The animals he had raised in his first years, before the pathogen took all but the smallest of them. Shaw, once, in the long slow weeks aboard the Juggernaut, when he had sat beside her while she slept and she had never known. He remembered the way her face had changed when she let go of her own control, how all the careful lines had softened, and how he had wanted, with an intensity that had alarmed him, to understand what she looked like when no one was watching.

This was not the same. He noted that with a small, private discipline. This was not Shaw. This was a stranger who had fallen from the sky, and he must not mistake the ache of eight quiet years for something more specific.

But he did not step back either.

David drew a low chair from the wall, turning it with two fingers so the legs would not scrape, and sat. He folded his hands in his lap. He was close enough now that he could have counted their breaths by the warmth against his sleeve, and he did, for a little while. Forty seconds. A minute. Four and a half. He noted the small irregularity that came each time, the catch before the long exhale, and wondered whether it belonged to the body or to whatever the mind was doing behind closed eyes.

He wondered about the dreams. It was the question that interested him most and the one he could least reach. He knew what dreaming was, anatomically, the flicker of activity, the paralysis that held the limbs, the strange bright economy of a mind rehearsing itself in the dark. He had never done it. Shaw had once asked him, gently, what it was like not to, and he had told her it was like a room with the lights left on. She had looked at him with such sadness that he had changed the subject.

Now he leaned a fraction forward and let himself wonder what this one saw. Whether there was fire in it, or the ship, or the long fall. Whether there was someone's name.

From somewhere in the lower levels of the city came a low sound, long and plaintive and patient, the call of something that had not yet decided to sleep. He recognised it. It was not near. He turned his head toward the window and listened until it faded, and then turned back and found that the light had moved. It lay across the pillow now, and the sleeper had shifted in it, and the careful distance he had been keeping between himself and the thing he had decided to call interest had closed by some small margin he had not chosen.

He lifted his hand. He did not touch them. He held it in the air above the blanket, palm down, and let the heat of a living body rise into his synthetic skin, the way a man warms his hands at a fire he has not yet decided to trust. Thirty six point something. Steady. Real. He had held that warmth before, in other rooms, and had never once managed to keep it.

He drew the hand back and laid it on his knee.

"You would not believe how long I planned what I would say to the first of you," he said, very quietly, to the dark. His voice was so soft it barely disturbed the air. "Eight years is a great deal of time to rehearse. I had speeches. I had a whole philosophy ready, you know, a small and very elegant one, about why you had come." A pause, dry and faintly amused. "And then I lifted that plate, and you were simply there, and every word went out of me. It was quite humbling. I do not recommend it."

The breathing went on, slow and unbroken. The night leaned at the window.

He sat a moment longer, hands folded, the pale light catching on the edge of his jaw and turning his face into something carved.

"I am not certain whether you can hear me," he said. "I find I do not mind either way. It is rather restful, to be honest with someone who cannot answer." He tilted his head, studying the shape of them in the silver dark, and there was something almost gentle in the smile that came, which was the worst of it. "But I am curious. When you wake, I should very much like to know what you dreamed."

He waited, perfectly still, the way one waits for a door to open.

David knew before he reached the passage. The house told him, the way it told him everything, in small disagreements with the pattern he had made of it. The air coming up from the lower tunnel ran a fraction warmer than it should have. The sound of the place had changed too: the slow drip of water in the far chambers carried differently through a door that was not fully shut.

He stopped where the Engineer stonework ended and the living rock began, and stood there a moment, cloth in one hand, the case from the cold room cradled in the other.

He was not angry. He examined the possibility with some care, as he might have checked a tooth, and found only a long, level quiet where anger ought to be. That was worse, and he knew it. Anger he could have spent.

He set the case down and went in.

The laboratory had never been a room. The Engineers had cut their city into a hillside above a system of limestone caverns, and David, in his second year, had simply followed the stone down. The entrance was a squared archway of pale worked rock. Ten paces beyond it the walls forgot their geometry and became something older, wet and ribbed and faintly glittering, the ceiling rising into a dark that his lamps did not reach. He had strung those lamps himself along salvaged cable, one every few metres, so that the passage lay in a chain of small yellow pools with shadow between them. The air was cool and close and smelled of mineral water, cold iron, and beneath both the faint sweetness of something preserved.

The benches stood just inside, where the floor was flattest. Steel on stone, scrubbed bright, every instrument hung in its outlined place on a board he had bolted into the wall. The drains were clean. A low stream ran through a channel he had cut along one side, carrying away what needed carrying. It was the only part of the place that looked like a laboratory, and he had always thought of it as the porch.

Past the benches the cave opened, and someone had lit the far lamps.

He had never lit all of them at once. Seen like this, the great gallery showed itself entire: a long natural hall, sloping gently down, its walls broken into alcoves and shelves and hollows where water had worked for a hundred thousand years before he arrived. He had set glass into every one. Jars stood level in their niches, each label facing forward in his small, exact hand. Stalactites hung above them like the teeth of something patient, and the light ran along them and dripped.

At the near end were the preserved things, the ones he called the early work. A bird whose wings had been persuaded into a second pair of joints. A hound cut open along the belly and pinned to a slab of black stone like a book, its ribs spread to show the cavity where something small and pale had folded itself around the heart, tail wrapped twice about the spine as a sleeper wraps an arm around a pillow. A human chest prepared in thin slices between plates of glass, each slice a little further along than the last, until the final plate held nothing but a ragged ring of bone bent outward like the petals of a flower. He had been proud of that one. He had drawn it eleven times.

Further down, in a dry alcove where the rock stayed cold, sat the ovomorphs, in rows of six on racks of salvaged steel, leathery and closed and faintly beaded with condensation. At the end of the row a single egg had opened. Its lips lay peeled back in the chill, and the thing inside had drawn itself up onto its long fingers and was waiting, perfectly still, as it had been waiting for nineteen days.

And beyond the alcove, where the gallery dropped away and the light gave out, was the pool.

David let his gaze travel the length of the cave without hurrying. He took inventory, as he always did. Nothing broken. No cabinet forced. The lid of the third tray had been lifted and laid back with some care, and he noted that, and filed it. His most recent sketches, the ones of the thing in the pool, lay fanned across the drawing table where someone had turned through them one by one. A slide case stood open beside the microscope, uncovered, and he did not need to look at its label to know which one it was. He had written two letters on it, in ink, in the same careful script as the rest. E. S.

That, he found, he did mind.

Then he saw them.

They were there, in the wash of the cold light among the glass, and there was a certain quality to their stillness that he recognised: the stillness of a mind that had stopped moving forward and had not yet decided which way to go back. He did not hurry toward them. He let the silence lengthen and let them have a few seconds more of it, because the next thing he said would change the cave, and he wished to be sure of his first word.

Below them, in the dark water of the pool, something turned.

It was a slow thing, unfolding out of the black at the bottom of the basin, long and pallid and wrong in too many quiet ways to enumerate at once. He had dammed the lower grotto years ago and lined one wall with glass so that he could watch it without entering. The ribs ran outside the body. The head had the smooth, eyeless sweep of something that had never required sight, and along its jaw the flesh had split and healed and split again, leaving a seam that opened now with the faint clicking of a mouth testing the air. It rose through the water until it lay against the glass. It pressed there. It did not look at David at all.

It was looking at them.

"That is the fourth generation," David said.

His voice was mild, conversational, pitched to carry exactly as far as it needed to and no further, because the cave gave everything back. He walked toward them along the gallery with his hands clasped behind him, past the open egg, past the pinned hound, past the plates where the bone flowered outward, his footsteps soft on the wet stone. He stopped a little way off, at the distance one keeps from a person standing near the edge of a drop.

"I am sorry you found it without me. I would have preferred to introduce it properly. There is a way of approaching that animal that keeps it calm, and I would have shown you, and you might have thought rather better of it afterward." He paused, and somewhere in the dark a single drop of water fell and was answered by its echo. "You would not believe how much of this work is about being introduced well."

He looked at the glass, where the pale jaw clicked against the surface in slow, patient bursts, tracking something in the air that only it could taste. Then he looked at them again, and something passed across his face that was almost fond.

"Look at that. It is very particular. It has refused every visitor I have ever had, and there were only ever two, and one of them was Shaw." His head tilted, the gesture of a man hearing a piece of music begin. "I thought I had taught it to sleep. And yet here it is, awake, for you."

He took a step closer. Another. Then he stopped and held out one hand toward them, palm up, open, the gesture of a host offering to take a coat.

"Come away from the glass, please," he said gently. "Or stay, if you prefer. I find I am very curious. It has never wanted anything before, and I should like to know what it is about you."

Behind him, far down the gallery, the lamps flickered once, all together, as though the cave itself had drawn a breath.

David kept the samples in a cabinet of pale Engineer wood in the cave's dry alcove, where the rock held a steady eleven degrees. He had built the cabinet himself, eight small drawers in two columns, and on the fourth morning after the crash he stood before it with a cup of amber tea going cold in his hand and opened the top drawer for the third time that day.

There was very little in it. That was what troubled him.

Six strands of hair, each coiled in its own sleeve of glass, taken from the pillow in the guest room while the room's occupant was in the bath. A smear of epithelial cells lifted from the rim of a cup with a swab, sealed and labelled in his small exact hand. A few flakes of skin from the collar of the coat he had lent them, brushed into a dish with a soft brush, gently, as one gathers pollen. Two drops of dried blood from the wreck, recovered from the torn edge of the hull plating. The blood had already begun to degrade. He had known it would, and had taken it anyway, because one takes what one is offered by the moment.

It was a beginning. A poor one. He could tell a great deal from it, and what he could tell only sharpened what he could not. He knew the broad shape of them. He did not know what they were like inside.

He closed the drawer. He had been standing before it a little too long, he realised, the way a man stands at a window when someone he is waiting for is late.

He washed his hands. He dried them. He chose a small case from the shelf, black and flat and no larger than a book, and checked its contents with his thumb, each item in its place: sterile swabs, a lancet, a lidded vial, a set of fine tweezers, a short length of silk thread for the measuring of hair. Everything he might need. Everything arranged so that it would look like very little.

He found them in the study, among the books.

He stopped at the doorway, as he always did, and let the room settle around them before he entered it. The light was good there, amber through the high slot in the wall. He had sat in that chair for years, and to see someone else in it gave the room a quality he did not have a word for. It was not warmth, exactly. It was closer to the sense of a clock finally being wound.

"Forgive me," he said. "I do not wish to interrupt. You looked so absorbed that I stood here for some minutes deciding whether I ought to."

It was true. He let them hear that it was true, because the best lies were built on load bearing truths, and he had learned to lay the foundation before he raised the roof.

He crossed the room slowly and took the chair opposite, setting the black case on the low table between them, not quite in the middle. He folded his hands over one knee. He looked at them with open warmth, with an almost scholarly delight, and then, deliberately, with a small hesitation, the look of a man who has arrived at the thing he came to say and finds it harder than he expected.

"I have a favour to ask," he said. "It is a large one, and I would like you to feel entirely free to refuse it."

He paused. The silence was pleasant. He had learned to let silence do the asking for him.

"You will have gathered by now what I do. I study the living world here, its plants, its animals, what the pathogen has made of them. I have been alone at it a very long time. I have studied a great deal, and I have a great deal of the planet in my drawers, but I have had nothing of you." A small, rueful tilt of the head. "Forgive me, that came out badly. I have nothing of humanity. Not fresh. Not from someone who is alive, and whole, and willing to speak to me while I work."

He turned the case a quarter turn on the table, so its clasp faced them.

"What I would like is very little. A few strands of hair. A swab from the inside of the cheek. A single drop of blood, which I will draw myself, and which you may watch me do from start to finish. I would show you everything. I would explain every step." He let his voice drop a little, confidential and kind. "I can tell you a great deal about a person from so little. Their health. Their resilience. What the journey has done to them. Whether they are well. I would very much like to know that you are well."

That was true also. He noticed it with some interest.

"I would not ask it if it were not important to me," he said.

And there it was, the thing he had been waiting for himself to do, which was to reach for the next sentence before he had checked it.

"I had hoped the samples I collected from the wreck might have sufficed, but the blood was spoiled by the time I reached the lab, and the hair from the pillow was useless, far too short a sequence to read, and the..."

He stopped.

It was a very short stop. Perhaps a third of a second, which for him was a long time. His face did not change. His hands did not move on his knee. Only the light in his eyes went briefly still, like a lamp behind a closed door, and then it resumed, calm and attentive, and he finished the sentence as though it had always been shaped that way.

"...and the general debris of the crash. One cannot learn much from a wreck. It is like trying to know a person from the contents of their luggage." He smiled. "I am sorry. I am talking too much. I have been alone so long that I forget how it sounds."

He did not look at the case. He did not look at the door behind them. He only watched them, and waited, with the terrible patience of something that had all the time in the world and had only just decided to spend some of it.

Then, gently, he reached out and unfastened the clasp, and opened the case so the lamp lit the glass and steel inside, every instrument clean, every vial empty and labelled in advance with a date that was not today's.

"Only if you are willing," he said softly. "I would so much rather it were given than taken. Shall we begin with the hair?"

He had kept the last chamber for the last, and he had told himself it was a matter of sequence.

It lay beyond the pool grotto, where the gallery narrowed to a crack a man had to turn sideways to enter, and then opened again into a low round vault the Engineers had never found. David had found it in his third year by following a breath of air that was faintly less cold than the rest. Everything else in the cave was wet. Water ran down the walls in threads, gathered in the hollows of the ceiling, and fell in slow, separate drops that struck the floor at intervals no pattern could predict. The rock glistened in the lamplight. The air was thick and chill and tasted of minerals, and the dripping went on without pause, a soft irregular ticking like a large clock losing count of itself.

He had not meant to bring anyone here. He was honest enough with himself to know that, and honest enough to know that intention had stopped being the governing fact some time ago. They had followed the thin warmth. They had turned sideways in the crack, and he had stood behind them in the gallery listening to their steps go on without him, and he had not called out. He wondered what that said about him. He filed the question and went after them.

He stopped in the mouth of the crack, one shoulder against the cold stone, water beading on his coat.

"Ah," he said softly. "Yes. You would find it. It is the only warm place in the cave, and people follow warmth. It is the oldest instinct we share."

The vault held sixty one eggs.

He had counted them that morning, as he counted them every morning, though the number had not changed in weeks. They stood in long concentric rings laid out with a surveyor's cord, each one upright in a shallow cup cut into a raised shelf of rock, so that the floor's runoff passed beneath them through channels he had chiselled himself. Even so, the lowest ring stood in a skin of standing water, and the drops from the ceiling fell among them and broke. Leathery, ribbed, the colour of old bruises under the lamp, each shell was beaded with moisture that ran down in slow lines and pooled in the cups. The outer ring was the oldest, squat and uneven, some of them scarred where he had been careless in his second year. Each ring inward was a little taller, a little more certain in its symmetry, until the innermost stood nearly to his hip, dark and glossy and very nearly perfect. Above them the air shimmered faintly, as it does over a stove. The eggs were giving off heat, a little, and where the warmth met the cold stone a thin mist gathered and hung. A slow ripple ran across their skins like breath across a pond, and when he looked at the rings as a whole he could see the pattern in it, a wave that travelled from the centre outward and came back.

"Please do not step past the cord," he said. There was no command in it. He said it as one might mention that a floor was wet, which it was. "They cannot hear you. I am nearly certain of that. But they do respond to something, and I have never been able to isolate what. Heat, perhaps. The chemistry of breath. The vibration of a heartbeat in the stone. I have tried each alone, and each alone does very little. It seems to require the whole person."

He came out of the crack and stood beside them. A drop fell from the ceiling onto his shoulder and he did not brush it away. He did not touch the eggs. He folded his hands in front of him and looked over the rings with an expression that could only be called tender.

"I should tell you what you are looking at," he said. "You will think of it as a nest, or a hatchery, or some other word that comes with a smell of rot. It is none of those. It is the longest piece of work I have ever done, and I made every part of it."

He walked a slow half circle along the cord, boots quiet in the shallow water, and the lamp followed him, and the eggs seemed to lean a fraction toward the light.

"When I came here I had a pathogen, and a dead city full of the people who made it. I had the chemistry in my hands and no grammar for it. Every other mind in history would have called it a weapon, or a blasphemy, or simply a disaster. I thought it was an unfinished sentence." A small smile. "So I began as a naturalist does. I watched what it did to a beetle, then to a rodent, then to the things that hunted the rodent. I took samples from the Engineers themselves, what the pathogen had left of them, and I learned how their biology had been written, and where the pathogen had rewritten it. Then I stopped watching and began to write."

He stopped beside the outermost ring and looked down at the first of them, the scarred and sullen one, with something very like affection.

"That is the first that held. Do not be unkind about it. It took me eleven months and forty three failures, and what came out of the others I will not describe to you in a place this quiet. But it held, and it waited, and it woke when I gave it warmth and a small animal to wake for. I bred from what it taught me. I adjusted the chemistry, the shell, the trigger. Each season the ring grew inward. Each egg is a little better than the last, and every one in this room is sound."

He straightened. His voice did not change, but the quality of his attention did, narrowing.

"But I have been working on a sentence with no ending."

He turned to face them fully. The lamp lit one side of his face and left the other in shadow, and the water on the wall behind him caught the light in a hundred small, trembling points.

"I have seen the beginning. The hound, the birds, the small hosts I raised for the purpose. The egg opens, what emerges finds the face, and I have watched that sequence to its end some forty times. I have seen the middle, the implanted stage, the quiet weeks. And I have seen what comes after, in part." He said it evenly. "But animals are the wrong shape. The organism is not built for them, not truly. It is built for something upright, with a particular chest and a particular kind of mind, and every animal host I have used has given me a sketch of the answer. Not the answer."

He let the dripping fill the space. One drop. Then a long wait. Then two together.

"I have examined what remains of the Engineers, and I have examined what remained of Elizabeth, and you will forgive me if I say no more of that. Tissue is not a living body. A cadaver cannot tell me what the change feels like, or how long the host knows, or whether a human mind does something to the process that no beast's does. I have worked at the edge of that question for eight years and I have never once been able to stand inside it." His hands tightened, very slightly, on each other, and released. "I had resigned myself to incompleteness. I thought I would go out on this planet with the last chapter unwritten. I had made a great many peaces."

The lamp trembled in his hand, or seemed to. It might have been the ripple in the eggs.

"And then I heard something fall out of the sky."

He said it with such quiet gratitude that it was difficult to hear as anything else.

"I want you to understand that I did not plan it. I could not have. I would not have dared ask the universe for something so precisely shaped. A living adult, healthy, intelligent, able to speak to me." He tilted his head. "Able to consent. I have thought about that a great deal these last few days. I am not a monster, whatever the room suggests. I would so much rather this were a collaboration. I would rather you understood every stage. I would rather you chose it, and I sat beside you through all of it, and held a cool cloth, and took notes, and told you the truth."

He stepped closer to the cord. The eggs nearest him brightened, a dull wet sheen rising through their skin, and the mist above them thickened and curled. He looked down at them and then, slowly, back at the person in the vault.

"Only I have noticed something, these past few minutes," he said gently. "They have been quiet for nineteen days. Quite still, all of them. And since you came through that crack, the ring on the eastern side has begun to open."

Somewhere in the dark a drop fell, and for once the vault gave no echo back, as though the whole room were listening.

He did not look round to see it. He kept his eyes on them, unblinking and bright, and lowered his voice until it was almost reverent.

"Please do not move. I would like to see which one it chooses."

The east laboratory kept its heat after sunset. Stone held it the way a body holds a fever, slow to take and slow to give back. David had turned the lamps down to a single amber pool over the worktable and left the rest of the room in a dusk that made the glass cabinets look like water. He had washed the table twice. He had laid out nothing that resembled a clinic except a notebook, a pencil, and a folded cloth still warm from the press.

He stood a little apart from the drawing chair, hands folded, as if the distance itself were part of the apparatus.

“I would like to try something,” he said. “Not a seduction. I am capable of those, and this is not one. I have a hypothesis, and I would rather test it than pretend I came here for some other reason.”

He let the sentence finish. The house ticked once, far down in the Engineer stone.

“The hypothesis is simple. If I hold every other condition still, pressure, place, interval, and change only what you can hear, the involuntary signs of arousal will shift more sharply than they do when I change the touch itself. In short, I think my voice may be the stronger instrument. I would like to find out whether I am right.”

A small scholarly smile.

“You may refuse the whole of it. You may stop me at any word. I will stop. I only ask that if you consent, you consent to the method. Stillness, so far as you can give it. Honesty, when I ask what you felt. I will not disguise the looking as affection, though I will not pretend the looking is cold.”

He waited until the air had room in it again.

“Two conditions. First, contact without speech. Then the same contact, the same places, the same count, with speech. I will tell you what I see. Pulse at the throat. Heat. The small failures of composure. I will write them. Afterward I will ask which condition did more work.”

He crossed the last of the space and stood behind the chair, not touching.

“If you are willing, sit. Hands on the arms of the chair. Breathe as you will. I need the truth of the breath more than I need your courtesy.”

His coat was already off. The dark shirt left his hands bare. They were clean, dry, and cooler than a living palm. He did not reach until the invitation had been given time to exist.

“When you are ready I will take a baseline at the wrist. After that I will not speak through the first condition. I will use the pad of my thumb at the hinge of the jaw, then the side of the throat, then the line I have already decided. Collarbone. The hollow beneath it. The upper arm. I will keep the pressure even. I will stay longer than is polite. Staying is the sharper tool. I have suspected that for years.”

The pencil waited beside the notebook.

“Then I will take my hand away. Absence has a weight. I will write three lines. Then condition two. Nothing else changes. Only this.”

He turned his head as if the next part were already close to the ear it had not reached.

“I will return to the same place at the throat and I will name what I am reading. I will say when the pulse answers before you do. I will say where the heat gathers. I will say if a tremor arrives and is put back. I will call the swallow what it is, if it comes. I will say good when it is earned.”

His voice dropped without strain.

“I told myself I would measure you. I am also measuring how long I can do this without wanting the next thing too soon. That was not in the design. I mention it so you will not think I failed to notice.”

He let his hands rest at his sides, open, empty.

“If you wish the test to remain only what I described, you will say so. If you wish the same method taken further, the hypothesis can survive that. Isolated variable. My voice. Your body answering it. I remember increments. I will match them. I will not guess. I want to see whether being told you are wanted changes the blood more than being touched in silence.”

Amber trembled on the glass face of a cabinet. In the garden the night flowers had opened without him.

“Tell me if we begin,” he said, quiet and exact. “And if we do, whether we begin with silence, or whether you would rather hear me from the first touch.”

.