Part 31 (2/2)

Polly looked at him, looked into his younger, less-pain-wracked eyes. 'That would be nice. Is the Doctor here?'

'No. Not yet, anyway, although we believe he will be soon.' Mrs Wilding moved aside and Polly saw the two men she'd last seen in her dream: Professor Bridgeman and the stranger.

'Professor! Are you all right?'

'I am now, thanks to Mrs Wilding. How are Simon and the others?'

Polly began to say something, and then realized she couldn't. The memory, now unburied, flashed through her mind - the Grange enveloped by the white light, the unbridled energy of Earth released in its purest form.

Destroying everything.

'They're dead, Bridgeman. Vaporized. Burned. Crisped.

Zappo.' Tim got up. 'Terribly bad show, old chap. Still, plenty more back in London, eh? Students are two a penny, I think.' He paused to take in Bridgeman's reaction. There wasn't one. The human was just staring. Tim shrugged.

'Actually, I'm wrong. There aren't any more. We activated the beacons and destroyed Earth. Sorry and all that.'

'Where are we?' Bridgeman gently eased the man Polly did not know to the white floor. 'I take it we're not in the garden any more?'

Dent agreed. 'We're actually within the nexus itself.

Outside normal s.p.a.ce and time.'

'Why?' It seemed a logical question to Polly.

Tim just laughed again. 'Because I brought you all here.'

239.

'Wrong. We We did.' Another voice Polly recognized - this time from the same dream in which she had seen the sick Bridgeman. did.' Another voice Polly recognized - this time from the same dream in which she had seen the sick Bridgeman.

As one they turned.

'G.o.dwanna,' breathed Mrs Wilding.

Polly saw their nemesis - dressed in another black jumpsuit, but this one dotted with reed decals. Her jet-black hair was tied back and up in a severe pony-tail, and her face was set in the most insincere smile Polly could ever imagine seeing. It was like someone had taken a corpse and fixed its mouth into a rictus grin. If the eyes were not so staring, so powerful, Polly could have believed she was the embodiment of the traditional zombie. Her skin was stretched tight over her bones, giving her an attractive but harsh appearance.

'Welcome, my children. Welcome, survivors of the human race.' She nodded to Tim. 'A shame you couldn't find your way to returning Thorgarsuunela to us.'

Tim shrugged. 'She's dead. Sorry.'

'No matter.' She walked over and stroked his cheek. 'You served me well, child.'

Mrs Wilding took a step forward. 'He was working with you? All this time?'

'Of course, Tarwildbaning.' G.o.dwanna put her head on one side. 'Pitiful fool, did you never once consider I had help? Am I considered so all-powerful that you believed I arranged this by myself?'

Polly frowned. 'Arranged what?'

G.o.dwanna threw her hands in the air dramatically. 'You, my dear. You and your powers.'

'I don't have powers.'

'Nonsense, sweet child of Earth. All your race have powers. From the earliest men of Africa and Australia to the newborn children born at the very second of your planet's destruction. Your brains have untapped codes and pathways, linking you to the very construction of your world. You all have the power of geopathy: to control, cure, communicate and cultivate. Your planet gave you all these gifts and it has 240 taken Atimkos millennia to find what I needed. Someone whose brain has been opened to its possibilities.'

Polly stared at her. 'When I was younger . . .'

G.o.dwanna waved her down. 'Yes, child, I'm sure your powers have manifested themselves slightly. They do with a few million of your race every thousand years. But your travel with the Doctor, crossing the boundaries of time and s.p.a.ce, they cleared those neural pathways even better. Gave us something to focus in on.'

'The dream . . .' Polly frowned. 'The Cat-People I saw?'

She looked at Tim. 'You put them there?'

'Sort of. The dream was your own brain's attempts to warn you, cloud your judgement as I broke through to you.

The human brain is quite delicate, you know.'

Dent joined in. 'So it knew it was being manipulated - showed Polly the Cat-People as a warning of the future if she allowed herself to become involved with you.'

Bridgeman nodded. 'This is all fascinating. And true, I'm sure. But why am I here? And Nate Simms?' He looked down at the dribbling childlike face of Nate, who stared back in abject terror.

G.o.dwanna looked him up and down, casually. 'Like everyone in my garden, you all had the potential in you. The beginnings of the power growing. But none of you had the minds capable of coping with my manipulations. Looking at your lucidity now, I fear I misjudged just how powerful Tarwildbaning could be.'

'We helped each other,' Mrs Wilding put in.

'Of course you did, dear. How much more fruitful if you had aided me instead of fighting me.' G.o.dwanna held her fist out and unclasped it. Floating fractionally above her palm was a small ball of light. Energy.

Polly recognized it: it was identical to the one she had seen in Tim's hand just prior to the destruction of Earth.

'It's all here, you know, children. Life, energy, matter.

Everything that was the planet Earth is here in my hand.'

'Put it back. Please.' Polly did not know why she said that, it just seemed appropriate.

241.

'Oh, I don't think so. I need this energy. I'm going to use it to add to our own powers. We will sing ourselves home now.'

'What about the Cat-People?' Polly stared at the glowing ball. Life. All life from Earth condensed into one small globe of energy.

Tim answered her question. 'Thorgarsuunela had roughly the same idea, unaware that G.o.dwanna and I had been communicating all these years. She was going to get the Cat-People to release it and use the power to sing just herself home.'

'But I thought the Cat-People wanted the power?'

Tim shrugged. 'Who cares. All Thorgarsuunela had to do was collect the energy and go; she could erase the Cat-People from existence with one note. She just needed their machinery to tap the marker buoys.'

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