Metamorphosis - Jean Lorrah [25]
When the deluge ended, Data and Thelia scrambled 69 up the steep trail to where they could look back on the rockfall. It had been aimed specifically at themthe fallen stones covered no more than ten square meters.
As they moved on, though, Data turned his attention to a message from his diagnostics. He looked down to see a glitter of circuits where the skin on the back of his right hand had been scraped aside. He was leaking chemical nutrients from a ruptured conduit to that extremity. His automatics had shut off the valve at his elbow, but what fluid had been present continued to drip.
Data covered his damaged right hand with his left as Thelia came up beside him. “I am unhurt,” she said, “but you are bleeding!” for fluid leaked between his fingers. She reached for his hand, and he instinctively pulled it away. “Let me see,” she insisted.
“Thelia,” Data said, “I think the gods have decided you must know what I am,” and he lifted his hand away.
A small gasp escaped her as she saw the metal skeletal structure, the sensor mesh, neural net, and control circuitry. She backed off, and for the first time he saw fear in her eyes.
“What are you?” “I am an android. A machine.”
“No! Plows and wagons and windwheels are machines! They do not move on their own. They do not speak. You look like a man, speak like a man.”
Holding his damaged right hand up, pinching off the leaking conduit with his left, Data searched for an explanation she might understand. He recalled the way Will Riker often referred to him. “Are you familiar with puppets, marionettes?”
“Toys? Dolls with jointed limbs?” Thelia’s eyes 70 widened. “You … you are such a creature brought to life?” Sudden terror lit the woman’s dark eyes. Her gaze darted fearfully back to where the rockfall blocked her escape downward. Then she turned and tried to run the other way, slipping in her panic, for the upward trail was far steeper fi ow than a few moments ago.
Data made no attempt to follow her, for the gods were clearly determined that she not escape confronting his nature. There was moisture on the smooth rock that had not been there before; Thelia struggled and scrabbled for purchase, only to slide and tumble back to Data’s side, gasping and panting. She flung herself away from him, her back against the rock wall, terror replaced by resignation. “I was taken in,” she said. “Kill me, then, and be done with it.
Data was astonished. “Thelia-I have no reason to kill you! Why are you so frightened? What do you think I am?”
“A golem. A homunculus.”
Data accessed his memory banks: the legends were ancient and inconsistent, but basically they dealt with man-created beings, either soulless or animated with evil spirits, which turned upon their creators to destroy them-usually after murdering a number of innocents. The Elysians, it seemed, had similar legends.
“I do not know how to show you that I mean you no harm,” Data said sadly. “Can you determine why your gods would choose to test you in such an unusual fashion?”
“They couldn’t think I would trust you!” she snapped.
“Thelia, I did not lie to you,” said Data, “but I did not know whether your gods wanted you to know my true nature. Obviously they do, but terrifying you cannot help you succeed in your Quest. I am sorry that you are frightened.” He tried a different approach. “Do you not trust your gods to protect you from harm?”
The fear in her eyes was replaced by wariness. “Which is the test? How am I to know? Are you an evil spirit, in the form of the dolls I so loved in childhood? Or are you truly the One from Afar that I was promised?” “Perhaps if you told me about your dolls-?” Data suggested. “I had many as a child.
I loved them and made up stories about them, until my mother heard me say one day I wished my favorite could come to life. Then she told me the tales of others who had made such wishes, and the evil they brought upon themselves and others. I put my dolls away then, and grew up.” She looked him up and down again, no longer panicked,