Doctor Who_ Human Nature Part 31

The Doctor stared at her. 'How did you know that?'

'Because if you hadn't, she wouldn't have let you out of her sight.'

He glared down at the ground, his hands describing awkward little circles. 'She doesn't know... She thinks I'm... It'd be difficult.'

'Not half as much for you as for her. Doctor, you owe her an explanation. Your experiment in being human has hurt-'

'Hurt? I'm a Time Lord. Smith was a human.' He gazed at Bernice vacantly. 'I can't love her. I don't feel that way about her.'

'So she's lost the man she loved.'

'Then how can I help her?'

Bernice looked at him sadly. Distantly, she thought that she might have felt angry, but he looked so lost. 'What, you didn't find that out? What was this all for, then, this holiday in the human condition?'

'I thought it would be peaceful.'

'I'm not talking about the aliens. You're not responsible for them. I'm talking about the heart that you would have broken, battle or no battle. Doctor, please, go and talk to her.'

He looked at her for a moment. Then he nodded. 'Yes.'

Joan was tidying her house as the sun rose over the battered town. The military had arrived in force in the market square and fire brigades from the whole county had been going from house to house, helping to repair the damage. All that had happened to her own place, thankfully, was that a few pictures needed straightening and a bit of that silver dust that was everywhere needed brus.h.i.+ng out of the carpet.

She glanced at the ring on her finger and smiled. It was quite a motif, that the sign of his love had spared her. And now he would be a hero, when the story got round, the schoolteacher who had saved everybody. It was quite a shock to discover that there were hostile creatures from other worlds. But there was also her own fallen angel. And he was, perhaps, representative of a gentler humanity that existed in the stars.

She sat down and let Wolsey leap into her lap. 'You're going to have to get used to a new householder,' she told him. 'But you like him, don't you?'

There was a knock on the door. She leapt up, much to Wolsey's disgust, and ran to it.

Her fiance stood there, wearing a hat and a jacket that she'd never seen him in before.

Joan folded him into her arms and kissed him.

Then she withdrew, staring at him in surprise.

She picked her way back through the hall and into the sitting room, supporting herself on the furniture as she went. She finally sat down. 'John...' she murmured.

'Do come in. I'm sorry to be so...forward.'

'It's not that.' The Doctor closed the door and stepped into the centre of the sitting room, not quite looking at her. 'You know what's happened, don't you?'

'No.' She looked up at him, terrified. 'Please tell me.'

'I had to change back. To save you. You asked Smith not to give August the Pod.

He didn't. I did. I'm the Doctor.'

'Oh...' Joan closed her eyes for a long, hard, instant. Then she opened them. 'I'm very pleased to meet you. Doctor. Is there nothing about you that's like the man to whom I've become engaged?'

'I think we believed in the same things. In the end. We're the same shape of person, using different memories. You made him more like me. He was willing to give his life.'

'Don't tell me that, I didn't want him to give his life. I didn't want to go through that again! My G.o.d, I don't think I can go through -'

She forcibly stopped herself. 'You don't love me then? You have his form, his habits - and you move like him. But you don't love me?'

'No. I can't.'

'Why? Is he not a part of you? The human part?'

'There is no human part. I'm a Time Lord. A different species. He was a character I created, a fiction.'

'Rubbish. I don't give my heart to fictions. When his spirit inhabited you, you were not so different to the way you are now. John, if you're simply lying to me, there's no need, you can take my heart and go- '

'No!' The Doctor grabbed her forearms and made her rise. 'He loved you, he loved you so much that he was willing to become me again to save you. Feel.'

He took her hands and put them over one of his hearts. Then the other.

'And is one of them his?'

For the first time since he'd come here, he allowed himself a moment's uncertainty.

'I think that both my hearts are mine. That was one of the things I wanted to learn, where one part of me ends, where the next begins. Many of his att.i.tudes and ideas, his ways of acting, were mine. But he's a different person, a role I created in order to learn things.'

'So you remember everything?'

The Doctor paused, then decided to tell the truth. 'Yes. What would be the point otherwise?'

Joan gave a short, bitter, laugh. 'You haven't learned how to love.'

'A fish can't learn to -'

'Walk?'

'Not that. A better metaphor. Whatever it is, I'm incapable of it.'

'Could you not become John Smith again?'

'If I could find another Pod. But such horror followed me. Such - ' He dropped his head. 'That's not true. I might become a man again, but it wouldn't be John. And I wouldn't want to do it. I know everything I am, and that includes the knowledge that I want to be me.'

'Well...' Joan let go of his hands, and moved off a little way. 'I believe that you're a good man. You didn't know that your human self would fall in love.'

'It seems obvious now. What else do humans do?'

'Go to war.'

'I did both, then. And I was half successful.'

She smiled, sadly. 'Oh, more than half.' She plucked the ring from her finger. 'Do you want this back?'

'No. Keep it. Please.'

Wolsey, oblivious to what was happening, was rubbing himself up against the Doctor's legs. Joan glanced down at the cat. 'I shall have to move, of course.

There's no school here for me to work at, now. I gained Wolsey through chance, when I arrived here, and I doubt that he would want to follow me to some other earthly destination.' She paused and took a sharp breath. 'I would like to think that you have a companion to guard you, besides Miss Summerfield. Would you be willing to take him on?'

The Doctor bent and picked up the cat, who curled up in his arms. 'Won't you miss him?'

'Miss him? I'll miss - No, no I'll get myself a litter of kittens and teach them all how to be good cats for good homes. May I keep those stories that you - that John wrote?'

The Doctor felt a heavy weight in his chest. 'If you wish.'

'Very well, then,' she said brightly. 'It's all decided. Was there anything else?'

'Joan... don't...'

'Don't what?'

'Don't...' The Doctor stared down at the cat in his arms. It jerked about, wanting to move, and then hopped up to lie along his shoulders. 'No. You must do what you have to.'

'Of course.' She quickly walked to the door and held it open for him. 'We both must. It was good of you to come and tell me. Thank you for saving us all.'

He paused for a moment at the door and gazed at her face. 'I hope that one day, when I'm old, when my travels are over, and history has no more need of me, then I can be just a man again. And then, perhaps I'll find those things in me that I'd need to love, also. Not love like I do, a big love for big things, but that more dangerous love. The one that makes and kills human beings.' He stretched out a finger to touch her face, but suspended it, an inch from her skin. 'It's a dream I have.'

He turned away and walked down the road.

He didn't look back.

Joan closed the door and sat down, not feeling anything. 'I should go to bed,' she said. Then she stood up suddenly, seized by the idea that she should run after him and grab Wolsey back.

She made herself stand by the door, not opening it.

And she stayed there for a very long time.

Laylock looked up at a sound from outside the tent. It was night, but he'd been pacing for hours, checking to see if the signal had been picked up by the vortex cabinet again.

The sound wasn't repeated, so he glanced at the dial once more.

'Good evening, Laylock.'

He spun round.

Alton was standing there, in a black robe now, rather than his school uniform. The robe carried no seal or insignia, but the cut of it suggested, as it was meant to, that the wearer was equally used to the darkened corridors of the Capitol as to alien fields and foxholes. Besides, an owl sat on his shoulder. Alton was pointing a gun at Laylock.

'Are they - did they- ' The old Aubertide took a step back.

Alton reached into a pouch at his belt. He produced a small bag of coins and handed it to the alien. 'Greetings from Aberdeen.'

He turned and left.

Laylock held the bag in his hand and sighed in relief. Then he went and switched off the vortex cabinet.

That night, Major Wrightson, who'd set up a detail of his men in the market square, was surprised to take custody of a prisoner. Hadleman and Alexander handed Greeneye over, together with statements about Rocastle and the hospital. They gave lengthy warnings about the prisoner, but still they seemed to want to be away.

Alexander finally led Richard from all the camouflage and khaki, the younger man still calling things to Wrightson.

The major put his prisoner in a police station cell, to be transferred to a military lock-up first thing. Greeneye was quite pa.s.sive. As Wrightson bid him goodnight he gave a wink and asked: 'Any chance of a corned-beef sandwich?'

Wolsey licked at the b.u.t.ter they'd put on his paws.

This new place was huge, with big white corridors leading off everywhere and an amazing range of interesting smells to follow. There had been another cat here, [image]

once, but it had gone now, so the territory was his. He'd already been shown a whole roomful of cat litter, and another with suns.h.i.+ne, climbing bars and a lot of different and challenging cus.h.i.+ons to lie on. Cat heaven.

The two new people were sitting in chairs in the room with the thing that moved up and down. It was warm, so Wolsey was curled on top of it. The two people were drinking from cups. Every once in a while the woman would reach out and hold the man's hand. She'd held on to him for ages when he'd first come through the door, then they'd made the drink together, hardly letting go of each other.

Odd things, people. Still, Wolsey thought that he was going to like it here. It already felt like home.

Then the smooth motion lulled him to sleep.

He was woken only once that night, as his new owner reached down, late and alone, to gently smooth the fur on his head.

The cat could see that the man was weeping... But there was n.o.body he could tell.

Epilogue.In June 1914, Archduke Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, was a.s.sa.s.sinated by Gavrilo Prinzip, a Serbian terrorist, while parading through Sarajevo. That city was the capital of Bosnia, then under Austrian control. The Serbians also claimed Bosnia.

The Austrians, angered by the killing and seeing an excuse to invade and conquer Serbia, sent the Serbians a list of demands. Some of these demands being completely unreasonable, the Serbians declined to meet them, offering instead to take the matter to the International Court at the Hague. Austria refused, and made preparations to invade Serbia.

Russia was allied to Serbia. It started mustering men on its borders. The great nations, bound by treaty, saw their rivals arming. Germany, allied to the Austrians, knew that France was allied to the Serbians. And the French wanted the German-held provinces of Alsace-Lorraine back. Therefore the Germans attacked France first. To do that, they marched through Luxemburg and Belgium.

And Britain had a treaty to protect Belgium.

Which is how the Ninth battalion of the Norfolk Regiment ended up on the Somme in July 1916, Captain Richard Hadleman with them. He had in his pocket some letters from Alexander, who, to his delight, had been spared his great decision by being judged too old and unfit to go. His life back in Farringham was much the same, bar the blackout at night and the very occasional sight of a zeppelin.

Richard had spoken up at a Labour Group meeting in October 1914, declaring, for some reason, that it was the duty of every good Socialist to enlist and protect the workers of Belgium. He'd seen the effect that battle had had on those children huddling about the fire - though that whole time seemed like a dream now - but he'd thought that he was a man, that he could make a sober decision to go to war and fight to his own specifications. Alexander had seemed very wise on the matter, in bed that evening. He'd said that, though Richard might be killed, it was his life to risk, just as it was a conscientious objector's right to risk hatred and ignorance at home. The government didn't possess the soul of either man, he'd said. Only that of the man who found himself forced or jollied into joining up because it was the only thing he could imagine doing.

Even then, Richard hadn't been comfortable with that.

Now he looked up at the absolute darkness above him and tried to scream, but it came out as a long, rattling choke.

Next time he'd stay home. Next time. As if there were wars in Heaven or h.e.l.l, as if there was another battlefield he'd find himself on. The letters he held would have been enough, at any point, to have had him sent home. In disgrace, yes, but home, and what was disgrace compared to that? But he'd never shown them to anyone.

It was 14 July, just past eleven o'clock at night, and Richard had been lying in the cornfield since the early hours of that morning, coughing up blood and liquids of other colours that disturbed him far more. It was taking him a long time to die. He had, oddly, been part of one of the few successful military actions of the war.

At 3.25 that morning, 20,000 British troops had rushed across no-man's land in the first-ever night attack, following only five minutes' bombardment. The Germans, used to the regular pattern of meaningless daylight sorties and endless night barrages, had actually been surprised. Five miles of their frontline had been overrun, the Norfolks firing as they ran along German trenches, bayoneting men as they woke from sleep. It had felt like a great victory, a breakthrough that might have brought this all to an end.

After the day looked won, towards late afternoon, Hadleman and his platoon had been sent to support a group of engineers running a telephone line from the Norfolks' incredibly advanced position all along this new frontline. They'd formed a marching group, making their way through the overgrown fields between the trenches as the engineers spun their big reel of wire on a cart behind them, looking around them warily. They had to take cover and creep on some occasions when it became clear that they were in sight of the new German frontline.

The soldiers of Hadleman's unit had been taken, as was the policy, from neighbouring towns and villages, and their a.s.sociated OTCs, so it was hardly a surprise that he'd found himself commanding one Lieutenant Hutchinson. The young man was a good soldier, as Hadleman quickly found, having had a lot of the bile knocked out of him in his first actions. He still occasionally seemed to look upon Hadleman with contempt, but he never showed it to the men, who seemed to understand his distance and coolness more than Hadleman's own frustrated efforts to muster or befriend them. There were few others of those boys who'd been at Rocastle's academy. Perhaps it was because they were all to be officers, and were thus with other units, or perhaps, Hadleman liked to think, their experiences really had changed them. There had been some stink about Merryweather refusing to embark his platoon at the rail station, and them being forced on to the troop train at gunpoint. Alexander had reported a fine letter from Anand, now back home in his father's kingdom. A troop of his father's infantry had been sent to secure British supplies in the Gulf, but otherwise the war had not touched him and he remained wary of it.