Part 17 (1/2)

'Everyone was infected,' said the Doctor. 'Everything was infected.' His pupils were so dilated, they looked like two dark holes in his face, holes into nothing. 'The virus chewed through the s.h.i.+ps the way it was designed to.'

'But why didn't you just come up with a cure or something?' Roze breathed. 'Why didn't you just go back in time and warn them?'

'It was too late,' said the Doctor. 'It had happened.'

'Two years from now?'

'That's the truth.'

Roze looked at Indigo, his glittering eyes filling up with tears. He felt himself stumbling away, finding the door handle. Behind him, Indigo was shouting something, but he didn't care.

Alekto

One picosecond from now You can't go through SOLID stuff. Where my fingers brush on the cinnamon bricks, they (the bricks) get older and younger, a few seconds, that's all. Maybe you could see my fingerprints in those sluggish atoms, if you looked close enough. But who's going to look?

So I have to go up, up, into the air, stepping on the spinning molecules. I can walk right around in a big SPIRRRRALLLLL, see? My arms move through the nothingness between the liquid dancing of the particles, lifted, drifting, faint peppermint.

The gla.s.s is a liquid too, you see? I can shoulder my way through that slow cascade. The pane is already a little thicker at the bottom. I push my face into the stuff, thrusting my fingers into the waterfall. There! There! My hand is right through. My hand is right through.

I look back as I wriggle and slide through the gla.s.s.

Where I've touched it, there are tiny smudges and sparkling colours inside the window. More of my fingerprints. But who's going to look?

There's a couple of aliens in the room. One up, one down, lying on the bed. What're they up to?

Piece of METAL, that heavy electron soup a sharp fleck in the empty air of the room. The one up has got a pocket knife. He's talking - he's the man in charge. I have to tune in to those waves in the gas to find out what's going on.

'I said you couldn't lie to me,' he says. 'You know what I want.'

He's sitting down next to the alien on the bed. He's got that blade right up to his eye eye! 'I'm waiting.'

'There are only the two of you, aren't there?' says the man on the bed. Oh, he's sparkling with time, he's been all through time, its fingerprints are all over him! He's the one I've been looking for! I have to talk to this guy! 'What on earth do you think you're going to do?'

'Like,' says knife-man, 'I'm really going to tell you.'

He's going to do it, he's really going to do it!

He's got one hand up in the air, his free hand. I close my own hands around it, pressing my palms to the organic envelope of living skin.

A few months from now he gets a ride back to Lalande.

It's only eight light years away, right? A pa.s.sing flying saucer.

The sharp tang of the strange ga.s.ses in the s.h.i.+p's air. The lurch in his belly as they touch down. Home.

And then he spends a couple of years trying to get back into the government. He eats some real real food and talks to some food and talks to some real real people. And then everybody dies. people. And then everybody dies.

He remembers that afternoon of complete panic, two years from now, him and the other civil servants trying to keep what has happened secret, but the corpses come stumbling out of the cordoned-off area in their hundreds of thousands, the gra.s.s disintegrating where they tread.

His own face peels off in chunks in a tiny government shuttle crammed so full that the living keep the dead standing up.

It hasn't happened yet. He drops the knife. He starts screaming and screaming. He runs out of the room.

The guy on the bed just lies there, sleepily turning his head to watch. His eyes are okay. 'Thanks,' he says softly.

Wow, this is the real thing. I peer into his face. Can he see me? How does he know I'm there? He reaches out to me, just a movement of the fingers of one hand. I curl my fingers around it.

We both get the shakes. It's like two radio stations jamming each other. Luckily he's tranked and I'm used to this stuff anyway. After a few seconds the waves of jittering fade away and we're in contact.

I see what I look like to him. Yeah, I've got a human face, human hands, but the rest of me is tracks and trails of time and molecules, spreading and spiralling back and out like feathers. I look like I have wings.

'You're beautiful,' he breathes. 'What's your name?'

I'm running my other hand over his hair and face, I can't help it. His timelines are all tangled up. He's like a book I want to read, before he can wake up and run away.

'It's been a long time since I had a name,' I tell him.

'What's your name?'

'I'm the Doctor,' he says.

Doctor! 'Can you make me well again?'

There's a machine next to him on the bed, along with some bits of junk. It sends spiralling lines out into time, and when they brush against me, the machine's lights flicker and it beeps and twitters. I press my hand against it, and it squawks and squeals and dies.

'What happened to you?' he asks.

I wish I could remember what happened to me.

'I found something... I'm not supposed to be like this! I found a thing that did this to me.'

'You're slightly out of phase,' he says. 'That's all it is. You must have been this way for a long time.' I nod. He sees a thousand faces nodding, smearing like a rainbow. 'Your temporal tangent is blurring all over the place. But all we have to do is put you in stasis for a few seconds, and re-anchor you.'

'You mean you could do it?' WOW! 'You could fix me?'