Part 36 (2/2)

'Not with this face,' the boy said, in a voice like oiled silk. 'Not yet.'

Doctorberniceace turned impulsively to the Hermit, his cheeks flus.h.i.+ng with childish anger. 'I thought I was the only one you told stories to!' he yelled. 'I thought I was the special one!'

'You're all special to me,' the Hermit replied. 'All of you young renegades who come and sit at my feet and listen to me talk.'

Doctorberniceace stamped petulantly. 'I don't understand.'

'One day. One day, when you will have forgotten we ever talked here, high above the constraining walls of the Citadel, when you have met the others who have shared my stories, then you will understand.'

'But I'm better than the rest. I deserve the stories. They don't.'

The Hermit's face hardened. 'Your path will always be difficult,' he said, 'for as long as you think that the universe knows who you are. Laugh at yourself, and practise humility.'

The boy at the Hermit's side looked away and scowled.

Doctorberniceace met the Hermit's calm, ironic gaze, and somewhere deep inside him, a door seemed to open. He turned and walked away down the hillside. Memories of future events filled his mind: one by one he examined them, and was shamed by his arrogance. Hot tears filled his eyes, refracting the landscape and making it appear fragmented and harsh. He wiped a hand angrily across his eyes; the blurriness vanished, but, through the canopy of the archaeology jetter she could see that the landscape remained essentially the same. Berniceacedoctor looked around. Outside beyond the equipment dump containing her excavating gear the terrain of the Vartaq Veil Dyson sphere rolled endlessly on, rising gradually in the far distance, the details lost in the atmospheric haze and the dim light of an old, weak sun.

Far to her right, one of the many fault lines between the different fragments of the sphere ran in a zig*zag for thousands of kilometres. Berniceacedoctor followed it with her eyes as it curved along, and up, and across, and back down again, until it joined up with itself a snake eating its own tail.

She slid back the jetter's canopy, stepped out into the rich sunlight and walked towards the edge of the fault line, wary of loose soil where air leakage had eroded the ground away from the skin of the world. Although the Dyson sphere's gravity was enough to maintain a breathable atmospheric envelope, much of that atmosphere had leaked away through the cracks between the plates and ended up as puddles of ice on the cold exterior surface. The little that was left was breathable just but weak and cold.

One of the Vart was standing nearby, spindly legs supporting its patterned carapace as it stared silently into the abyss. It hissed, but whether in greeting, whim or warning her translator could not tell.

Berniceacedoctor felt a tiny bud of anguish unfold in her stomach. The s.h.i.+p which had been sent to take her to the new dig on the Draconian*discovered planet of Heaven was leaving in a few hours. This was her last chance. She had been seeking this particular creature since her team had discovered an intact but deserted s.p.a.cefleet Dalekbuster, stripped of all insignia and identification, sitting on a hill some thirty thousand kilometres from their base camp. She hadn't been surprised. She'd been following the trail of her father's lost s.h.i.+p for years: moving from dig to dig, planet to planet, looking for the subtle traces of his pa.s.sage. And now, just hours before she was due to leave, she had managed to locate a Vart who had seen the s.h.i.+p land.

'Vart?'

The Vart rotated its carapace to watch her as she walked up to it.

'I am told that you have memories of seeing others, like me, many... er, many...' G.o.d, how do you say 'years' to an alien whose world is wrapped completely around its sun? 'A long time ago.'

The Vart s.h.i.+fted its head so that it was facing forward, elevated its front sets of legs and began to edge slowly into the crack between the vast plates of rock.

'Please,' she cried. 'Please! It's taken me months to find you.'

The Vart halted, and looked back at her, grinding its mandibles slowly.

'I'm looking for my father,' she blurted. 'He he went away, when I was small. I've been trying to find him ever since.'

'Ssss... ssss... sssssksss...' the Vart said.

Berniceacedoctor fiddled frantically with the controls of her translator, trying to get a fix on the particular dialect.

'Ssss... sskt... ktch.... tkcha...'

Almost got it. She adjusted the contextual a.n.a.lyser.

'Tchk-k ko away now, Benny, but I want you to know that I love you, and I'll be thinking of you when I'm gone.'

Berniceacedoctor stood facing the alien, open*mouthed, unable to believe what she was hearing. She couldn't feel the ground beneath her feet, or the breeze on her cheek. The world around her seemed to go fuzzy around the edges.

'And look after sssstchsss sssstchsss... Mummy for me until I come home.'

'Mummy died,' Berniceacedoctor sobbed. 'She died, Daddy. You left me, and you never came home, and she died!'

All self*control was sliding away now, and Berniceacedoctor was a child again, watching from a blast*window as Mummy staggered away through the blazing wreckage of the street, looking for her daughter's toy.

'They said you were a coward!' she screamed at the Vart in the s.p.a.cefleet uniform with the row of Conspicuous Bravery ribbons pinned down the arm. 'They told me your s.h.i.+p broke formation and ran.'

'It wasn't your fault,' her father said gently. 'Even if you hadn't been scared of the fire, even if you had tried to tell Mummy that you didn't want the doll, she wouldn't have heard you. The blast from the Dalek s.h.i.+p's plasma cannon had stunned her. She didn't know what she was doing.'

Berniceacedoctor sank to her knees, sobbing hysterically.

'But they said you were a coward,' she said again, holding the words like a mantra.

'No,' he said, 'they never did. You You did, but you weren't talking about me.' did, but you weren't talking about me.'

The Vart turned and scrabbled into the crack that led from warmth and light into the darkness. Bernice watched it go, and felt a small area of darkness in her mind that she had always taken for granted dry up and blow away...

Ace awoke to find the Doctor standing over her and staring off into the distance. She stretched and, as she did so, fleeting memories touched her brain: images of a mountain, a hospital bed, a doll's head, coasting on a wave of flame, landing at her feet. Looking down at herself, she was relieved to find that everything was intact, where it should be, and recognizably hers.

She stood and looked around. The Mushroom Farm was as placid as the first time she had seen it, and Bernice was lying beneath one of the metal parasols.

'Okay?' Ace asked.

Bernice smiled quizzically. 'I feel... fine. No, better than fine, perfect.'

Ace ran a hand through her hair, and took a deep breath. 'Me too,' she said.

Bernice held out a hand. Ace looked at it for a moment, then tentatively touched it. Nothing happened. More confidently, she pulled Bernice to her feet.

Their eyes met. Ace recalled memories that she knew were not hers, and she knew from Bernice's expression that she was finding the same. And somewhere deep down within both of them, a tiny core of alienness sat and smiled at them.

'Doctor?' Ace said.

He turned to look at them, and Ace thought that he looked older, and more tired, than she had ever seen him.

'Doctor, what happened?'

'We succeeded,' he said eventually. 'Together, the strength of the emotions that we dredged up from our respective pasts brought the morphic field machinery back under control.'

'What about Bannen and Mark?' Bernice asked.

The Doctor sighed. 'IMC had already destroyed the feedback control mechanism by putting the torch to the interior of Moloch, but we couldn't have succeeded without it. I suspect that if you go back there, you will find that the forest has regrown.'

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