Doctor Who_ Eternity Weeps Part 23

I struggled to keep my voice calm. 'Look. We don't have time and you know it. You know what the stakes are. If you can't make this decision get me someone who can. Get me the guy in the recording for heaven's sake!'

The woman frowned. Licked her lips. 'He's dead. The infection has reached us. The base is on condition-one alert. We're quarantined?' She coughed. I realized she had been coughing intermittently all through the exchange, but I had been too preoccupied to notice. I also realized the movement behind her was not the orderly bustle of a well-run ops room, but the near panic of a bunch of people trying to keep it together as long as possible before the inevitable end.

'Look, I realize your problem, but -'

'No, you don't. People are down. Comm channels are going down. Christ, the antennas are melting right off the frames. Now, I'm in charge here. I have ultimate authority; ultimate responsibility. If I disarm those bombs now I may not be able to rearm them again. If you are a terrorist I will have been responsible for destroying the world!'

''For the last time, I'm not a terrorist! They're dead! Antennas don't "melt off their frames", and I'm not a b.l.o.o.d.y terrorist!'

She seemed about to reply, then was distracted by an excited shouting from behind her.

'The ID's checked out. She's on the level -'

'You mean the ID's on the level. She could still be a -'

'We're registering ground shocks! We're losing the antennas - I felt like reaching out and grabbing the woman by the throat and shaking it.

Only the fact that I knew I'd be wasting my time stopped me. You can't throttle a laser beam. 'Listen to me! I need a decision! Now!'

The woman turned and issued orders, then turned back. 'We've authenticated your ID. I don't know how much time we have. We're preparing an info blip. Set your channel to - Static.

'The bombs, you idiot, have you disarmed the bombs?'

Nothing. The transmission was over, the channel dead. Knowing my luck lately, so were we.

I stomped angrily over to the plastic screens - no mean feat in one-sixth gravity - and pulled them open. Where was Jason? I needed someone to shout at. He'd gone. Chris was there though, loping towards me. I waited.

One piece of good news. That was all I needed. Just one. Please.

No chance.

Chris bounced to a stop and said, 'Tammuz got away. He killed one of the soldiers, took his gun and his force field. Sorry, Benny. I'll keep looking.

We'll get him eventually?'

I shook my head. 'No. Let the soldiers do that. I've got something more important for you to do.'

'What's that?'

'Do you have your laptop with you? And that hacker software the Doctor gave you?'

'It's in the TARDIS. Why?'

I ushered him back into the control area, showed him the picture of the two missiles en route to the Moon with their . nuclear payloads. 'Chris, meet the Flopsey Twins. Benjy Bunny and Billy Bunny. Say h.e.l.lo to Mister Myxomatosis. Chris. I want you to access the control systems and kill these wretched things before they kill us, OK?'

Chris shrugged agreeably. 'Whatever you say, Roz. I'll need to get out on to the surface to establish a direct line of sight but that won't be a problem.

I'll get my laptop and the Doctor's umbrella.'

It took me a moment to realize what Chris had said: 'Roz?'

Chris shook his head. 'Did I call you "Roz"? That was silly. Sorry, Benny.'

'Disarm those bombs and you can call me Cleopatra Queen of the Nile. I'll even cuddle a snake if you ask nicely.' Chris grinned, ran off in long strides to fetch his laptop.

Left to my own devices I decided a short breather was in order. I sat down in one of the NASA chairs and put my feet up on the table which held the various alien artefacts. They were a mixed bunch. There were pieces of stone, some obviously acid-etched, mingled with chunks of etched crystal that might have been bits of circuitry or machinery. I looked at these and thought of blasting charges, intrusive archaeology. Why couldn't people be more patient? They'd obviously blown something up when they'd first got here. By accident? I had to a.s.sume so. I sighed.

Gla.s.s boxes held things that might have been tiny, crystalline sea sponges.

The sponges floated in a brown liquid. The boxes were labelled with acid warning signs. I looked closer at the specimens. As a kid I'd kept a chemical garden. Metallic salts and crystals sown in a fish tank full of watergla.s.s. But these formations were not like those. They had. been very beautiful but still, unmoving, rigid. These forms moved. As if they were breathing.

I sat up straight. The formations were alive.

Alien life? In an installation six billion years old? Had they been cloned?

Grown by the NASA people?- Were they intended to be here? Were they part of the operating system? Could we use them to fix what had happened to Earth?

A sound behind me made me jump. A scuffling sound and a throaty bleating noise. I turned. The sheep. It was the d.a.m.n sheep. It pushed its way into the control area and moved towards me, bouncing comically in the unfamiliar gravity, one leg stiffened by the addition of a force-field emitter. It was making unhappy-sheep noises. I wondered if it knew it was on an alien world. The first sheep in s.p.a.ce. I giggled. Then I suddenly thought of Bill Raelsen, Terry Sehna, Ellie n.o.ble. They would be here somewhere; their bodies would. If what Liz had told me before she died was right. I resolved to go and find them when I had time. Try to give them some kind of decent burial.

The sheep pushed back out through the screens and wandered off.

I looked back at the alien life forms in the specimen boxes. What if they hadn't been grown? Where had they come from? Another chamber?

Another part of the base? I unsealed one box, reached inside. The sulphuric acid sloshed around my force-field-protected hand, harmless as was.h.i.+ng-up water. I touched the spongelike formation. I don't know what I expected. A revelation maybe. Communication. Something.

There was nothing. Just the faint, grainy texture of the crystalline surface.

I withdrew my hand, let the excess acid rain back into the box. I was about to seal the box when someone touched me. I jumped, dropped the box.

Acid splashed over the table, dripped on to the floor, where it puddled harmlessly? The sponge fell to the ground and rolled away. I expected it to shatter. It didn't.

Jason picked it up and held it out to me. 'Sorry.' I reached out to take it from him. He wasn't moving His face was blank, frighteningly so. I remembered a time in South Africa when he had pulled a knife on a villager who was asking us for medical help. He thought the woman was a first-stage Ebola victim. When he found out he was wrong he put the knife away and apologized. Not that that would have helped if he had been three seconds quicker. It was a little reminder of his darker side that I could have done without.

'Jason, put the sponge back in the box.'

Jason blinked. 'I ... er ... sure. Here. Here, give me the box, then, and I'll . .

.' He tailed off.

'Jason? What is it?'

His voice was as disbelieving as his expression. 'It's this thing.' He waved the sponge. 'It's alive. It recognizes me?'

I laughed. 'Don't be stupid. Put it back in the box and we'll - I stopped then.

Another voice was speaking? The Ark.

'Attention. This is the personality matrix of the Astronomer Royal. Attention Jason Kane. This is a courtesy message. Welcome to the Genesis of Cthalctose. We thank you for your friends.h.i.+p and invite you to visit the planet below. When the terraforming is complete and life has begun again, come to us. Teach us what you know. Help us grow and learn. Shape our new world as you shaped the old. Welcome, Jason Kane. Welcome to our Genesis?'

I was still gaping a moment later when the machine hanging overhead unfolded like an origami trick and what looked like most of a solar system emerged?

I ducked to avoid a G-cla.s.s sun?

'Jason Kane, what the h.e.l.l have you been doing?' My voice was a squeaky mixture of surprise and irritation. A number of planets spread out around me. I aimed an irritable kick at a barren ball of rock some three thousand miles in diameter. The planet pa.s.sed right through my foot, ignored me completely to a.s.sume a tide-locked orbit around the sun.

I could see Jason was trying to catch his breath. 'I ... I don't know, Benny, honestly. I don't understand! It's nothing to do with me!'

'Oh great.' I folded my arms, allowed a shower of comets to pa.s.s through me and coalesce into a second planet. 'Men. It's all the same to you, isn't it? The conception of a child, the genesis of an alien species. It's the same old excuse we hear, every time. "It's not my fault. It's nothing to do with me." '

Jason recoiled from the bitterness in my voice. Good. Let him realize what he sounded like to me sometimes. 'Benny, what are you talking about?' A shocked expression dawned across his face in the ghostly light from the second planet as it formed between us. 'Are you -?'

The second planet moved slowly on its...o...b..t, deepening in colour until it was a yellow-ochre globe streaming with sulphur compounds and acid rain.

A voiceover in my head T recognized as the Astronomer Royal droned on about billions of years, about sulphuric acid phenols, about the genus and genius of life. I tried to ignore it. I had more important things to argue about.

'And would it matter to you if I was?'

He tried to move closer. A planetary moon got in the way.

Jason stopped, let it orbit past, a grey mess of craters, a young world nonetheless. 'Benny. That's hardly fair, is it?'

'Neither is running off with a bit of French totty!'

'Well what do you want me to do? You've been behaving like a d.a.m.n kid for weeks!'

'What do I want you to do?' We skimmed the surface of the moon, grey, lifeless, half familiar, then headed out on an elliptical trajectory for the second planet. 'Oh, hey. What do I want you to do? How about showing a little responsibility? You can't spend the rest of your life running away from Daddy. I should know?'

By now we were descending, falling down from orbit into the atmosphere of the second planet, rus.h.i.+ng through clouds of sulphurous yellow and brown, dropping out of the atmosphere to skim a chain of terrifying volcanoes before plunging into a sea of boiling acid.

'I'm not running away! I'm trying to heal!'

And there was life all around us, the oceans were full of it, crystalline life, beautiful, like starfishes, like anemones, huge, hundreds of metres wide, and intelligent. Cthalctose. According to the Astronomer Royal's voiceover they had art, science. They had plays, fiction, mathematics, astronomy, astrology. They had children and hope and beauty and fear and predators and politics and - 'That's all I hear from you! "I'm trying, Benny. I'm trying." Well you're not wrong there are you? You tried to get off with a girl in Paris. You tried to tell me you didn't know why I was mad. You tried to apologize. You tried not to let me see you fancied Sam Denton more than me! You tried to rescue me!

You tried that one at least twice! You're always trying to do things, Jason.

You spend so much of your d.a.m.n life trying that you never do anything!'

And now we were ascending, moving out of the oceans, shooting across the mouths of the volcanoes, through stinking smoke and lava, through burning clouds and up into the cool dark of orbit.

'Come on Benny, you know that's not fair. Everyone's different. Some people are survivor types, some aren't.' We were past the lunar orbit by now; the outer Solar System unfolded around us with dizzying speed.

'Remember the Hindenburg? Some people stand in the aisles and try to get their luggage, some people climb over the seats to get out. Just because someone does the wrong thing doesn't make them less of a person for it.'

'No,' I screamed, ducking to avoid an asteroid belt. 'No, it just makes them dead!' A gas giant whirled past, a brown dwarf, eight or nine times the ma.s.s of Jupiter, shepherd moon to a gigantic ring of stellar dust encircling the Solar System's sun.

'Every time, Jason! Every time something like this happens you freeze. You just stand there waiting for instructions, waiting for someone to tell you what to do.'

Another gas giant loomed before us, then another, slightly smaller planet, then we were accelerating outwards again, shooting away from. the sun towards the Oort cloud. And something else. Something moving.

Intractable. Unstoppable. The Other.

'Well now I'm telling you. Think it through. Weigh the facts. Make a decision on your own for once, and for once in your d.a.m.n life be responsible for the results of your actions!' , The Solar System began to distort. The outermost gas giant fell into the Other and vanished in a burst of X-rays. The Other was a singularity. A black hole. I knew that without the helpful voiceover from the Astronomer Royal. What I found out that I didn't know was that this particular singularity was on a course that would take it through the heart of this Solar System, destroying it utterly, a cosmic accident about which the Cthalctose could do nothing.

'Or just stand there and wait meekly for your luggage and b.u.m with the rest of the victims.' Despair and bitterness mixed in my voice. I waited for a reply from Jason. There was none. The rest of the Solar System fell remorselessly into the black hole. Gas giants. Dust. Asteroids. The works.

It was heading towards the sun and the inner planets when something happened. Something I couldn't see. Something was wrong with the singularity. It was glowing, like a sun, a brilliant sun, except that singularities didn't do that, couldn't do that, and I realized I was seeing a flash of radiation, of X-rays, hard radiation, heat, light, something that was impossible. Enough to irradiate a planet, to kill all life. Enough to melt a lunar hemisphere, send a now-familiar Moon hurling out of the Solar System?

Impossible.

Yet I was watching it happen.

Terrified by this ancient calamity I could barely understand let alone experience, I reached out to Jason for support. Our hands met, the force fields opened to let us touch. His skin was hot, flushed. Was he angry?

Upset? Scared? Did he understand what we were seeing here? The Genesis of the Ark? The destruction of an entire planetary culture?

I felt his hands enclose mine. I reached out for him, but he wouldn't hold me. 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean any of that.' He didn't answer, just pulled away slowly.

Small enough to fit between us now, the Solar System began its last inevitable collapse. The inner planets vanished in bursts of radiation. More stellar material vanished into the all-consuming maw. The sun began to unravel?

'Jason? We have to talk. Hold me. Please.'

Jason did not respond. The singularity impacted the stellar surface, sank beneath and began to orbit. Moments later the sun was a dark ribbon of flame, then gone entirely. Nothing was left of the Solar System except a dark hole in the Universe and a tiny, wandering Moon.

The machine refolded itself. The lights came back on.

I looked around for Jason. He wasn't there. I looked in the obvious places.

Behind the cabinets, under the table. I found the broken specimen box, the crystallized sponge and a chicken. But no Jason. I knuckled my eyes tiredly - and that was when I realized something else was missing. My ring.

The time ring.

I had a sudden terrible premonition of what my husband was going to do. I yelled after him but I knew it was too late. Six billion years too late.

I kicked the chicken.

It didn't bring him back.

Chapter 10.

When I was little there was one thing I believed in. One thing in all the pain and hurt that would take me away from my life, my dad, all of it. I kept this one thing folded in half and stuffed in the pocket of my jeans. I cried myself to sleep most nights clutching it; I bunked off school most days to read it, over and over again. It was the only thin I had when I left Earth.