Doctor Who: The Also People (32 page)

It would have worked out, she knew that; they would have made it work. They should have at least got their chance, that was all anyone could really ask for.

She bent down and picked the capsules off the floor and set them back on the dresser.

'I don't owe you any favours, Kadiatu,' she said, 'but I'm damned if I'm going to have your blood on my hands.'

That's it, Doctor, she thought, the bitch lives.

FeLixi squatted on the river bank, the morning sun hot on his naked back and shoulders as he watched Roz easing herself cautiously into the water. 'It's still freezing,' she called.

'Of course it is,' he called back. 'What did you expect?'

Roz gingerly splashed water over her face and shoulders. Sunlight glittered off the rivulets running down the brown slopes of her breasts and around the strangely rounded areolae of her nipples. FeLixi admired the spare angularity of her hips and thighs, the curve of her back as she bent down to wash her face, the uncompromising set of her shoulders.

'Aren't you going to wash?' she asked.

'In that?'

'If you think I'm coming anywhere near you until you've washed,' said Roz, 'you've got another think coming.'

FeLixi sighed and stood up.

'Where are you going?'

'There's soap in the hamper,' he said.

She washed his back. The water was shockingly cold but the sun kept them from freezing. She turned round and he reciprocated, working his thumbs into the permanent knot of tension between her shoulder blades.

'I found a body in a pool once,' said Roz. 'It had six fingers on each hand.'

FeLixi paused with his fingertips resting on her back. Her skin texture was subtly different from his own, not coarser exactly, but somehow thicker, as if it had been designed for a rougher environment.

'Don't stop,' she said. 'I was enjoying that.'

'Your first dead person?' asked feLixi.

'My first murder victim,' she said. 'On a little armpit planetoid called Skag when I was an initiate and squired to "Wrath of God" Konstantine. Did I tell you about him?'

'In detail.'

'Just checking.'

They rinsed off and clambered out of the river, raiding what was left at the bottom of the picnic hamper for a makeshift breakfast. When the sun had dried them sufficiently they pulled their clothes off the tree and got dressed, as if their earlier naked intimacy were a scarce resource, something to be rationed out and made to last. FeLixi sat down against the trunk of the tree and put his arms around Roz, drawing her against his chest, amazed again by how small she felt when he held her.

She started talking, just as he had known she would, about the plantation at the Borodino Oasis on Skag and the young girl that she found floating face up amongst the yellow reeds that fringed the pool in the rocks.

'The funny thing was,' said Roz, 'that I was more excited than anything else. It was my chance to prove myself.' She chuckled. 'Squire Roslyn Forrester, ready to dispense justice to the high and the low without fear or favour.'

'You were an idealist,' said feLixi. 'I'm shocked.'

'Damn right I was an idealist,' said Roz.

She even had a suspect, Boss Shuster, the plantation overseer. His pheromone trace was all over the rocks that surrounded the pool. It seemed he went up there on a regular basis because that's where the Skag maidens washed themselves. 'You get a lot of alien races that are virtually pass-for-human,' said Roz. 'The Skags were one of them, except a bit skinnier and they had two thumbs. The way I reconstructed it was that Shuster was in the habit of picking out a girl that he liked and pulling her away for a bit of rough and ready romance, only one day one of them put up a fight.'

FeLixi had enough experience from the proxy wars to know how the story was going to end.

'The human colonists all closed ranks on me,' said Roz. 'As far as they were concerned, raping natives was all part of their jolly frontier lifestyle, a perk.
Jig Jig Bunnies
they called them. Boss Shuster had more alibis than a codpiece at a nudists' convention. But what got me was the way none of the Skags were willing to testify against him. If they had, I might have been able to break his alibi.'

'So you blamed the victim instead?'

'Yeah,' said Roz. 'The way I figured it was that with an attitude like that they deserved to be exploited.'

'And now?'

'And now I'm your
Jig Jig Bunny
,' said Roz. She reached upwards to touch his face. 'The primitive barbarian.'

'Is that what you really think?' he asked.

'Yep,' said Roz. 'Mind you, try and drag me behind a rock and I'll have your testicles off with a blunt spoon.'

'I'll bear that in mind,' said feLixi.

There was a smell to saRa!qava's kitchen: a residue odour of hot yeast and flour that leaked by osmosis through the semi-permeable force membranes of her ovens. There were other domestic smells, laid down as a microscopic patina of molecules and pheromones on the material fabric of the kitchen table, the work surface and the cool whitewashed walls: caramel, spilt coffee, the milk burp scent of the children. It was a cultivated thing. House being perfectly capable of scrubbing the air back to a pristine state and sterilizing every surface with a single twitch of its domestic force fields – she had only to ask.

It was not so easy to erase the patina of memory, the steady accretion of the decisions she'd made during her lifetime.

She breathed in the smell as she sat at the kitchen table in the half darkness. They would be waking up at the villa soon; at least Bernice would be. Rumour was that
he
never slept. She had half imagined/half dreamt of him during the night – perched on the roof of the villa like some awful nocturnal predator, like a bird that hunted only during night, circling high on the thermals, watching, always watching for the small furtive movements that would mark his prey.

That the Doctor would make the connection was beyond doubt, it was only a matter of time before Bernice and Chris added their pieces of the puzzle.

She wondered if the prey had any inkling of its fate. Did it sense, just for a moment, that shadow falling out of the darkness before the world ended in a confusion of wings and talons?

Strange, she thought, how fast your life could unravel.

Chris was asleep upstairs with Dep, her hair tangled around his body as it had once, when she was small, tangled around saRa!qava's arms and as Dep's father's hair had caught at her that day up at the windmills. Over the years it had been easy enough to convince herself that stealing Dep was no big thing. During that time Dep's father had visited the sphere on only three occasions and never once visited iSanti Jeni or saRa!qava. She had grown so blasé it had almost ceased to be a secret at all, until the day vi!Cari had told her that it knew.

One scream and you're on your own
; that was the saying. After that first scream, when you sucked in air for the first time, all your decisions were your own. Irritated with your parents, move out. Hate school, don't go. Don't blame society, society is not to blame.

And now she knew her daughter was perpetuating the sins of the mother, They said there was a pheromone release associated with pregnancy, whatever the mechanism was. SaRa!qava had watched them lying together in Dep's room and she had
known
.

In a morbid moment during the night saRa!qava had called up the average life expectancy of someone living under social isolation. It was thirty-two years, predominant cause of death auto-termination.

Who had told Chris about her skills as a hyperspace engineer? Why had she told Bernice about Dep's father? Did she have some kind of deathwish, did she want to be blamed?

No one to blame but herself.

She didn't want to live the half life of a social outcast.

'House,' she called, 'call Bernice, please.'

The Doctor looked up and down the beach. 'Why here?' he asked.

Bernice unfolded the blanket and laid it out on the sand. 'I think she wants to avoid any eavesdroppers.' She opened the hot section of the beer cooler and pulled out a flask of coffee.

'She doesn't want Dep's origins to become general knowledge.'

They sat down next to each other on the blanket.

'Why did she tell you, do you think?' he asked.

'I think she had to tell someone,' said Bernice, 'and she figured that what with me being a barbarian I wouldn't care. And she was right, I don't.' Bernice felt something sting her palm and brushed irritably at it with her other hand. 'Damn,' she said, 'sandfly. Someone is taking authenticity too far.'

Something wriggled unpleasantly against her skin and she looked down. A sandy-coloured grub thing had attached itself to the middle of her palm. It was less than a centimetre long with a segmented body, its head hidden by a smear of blood. Her blood. She realized it was trying to burrow its way through her hand. She gasped with the sudden onset of pain and shock, frantically waving her arm to try to break the thing's grip.

'Doctor,' she yelled.

The Doctor leaned over and, almost casually, seized the grub by its tail and yanked it free, leaving a small ragged hole in her palm. Bernice gritted her teeth and took the handkerchief that the Doctor offered her, making a fist around her hand to stop the blood.

'Shit,' she said. 'What was that?'

The Doctor gingerly held the grub's tail between thumb and fingertip and peered at it. The thing kept trying to twist upwards and bite him, tiny mandibles snapping at his fingers.

'Curious,' said the Doctor.

'I'm glad you find it so interesting,' said Bernice. 'That little bugger just took a chunk out of my hand.'

'Stand up,' said the Doctor quietly, 'but very slowly.'

Bernice got to her feet, wincing as her injured hand banged against the beer cooler. 'We're in trouble, aren't we?'

'Possibly,' conceded the Doctor.

Bernice laughed mirthlessly. 'I knew this place was too good to last.'

The Doctor threw the grub away with a fluid flick of his wrist. They watched it as it landed a few metres away and proceeded to burrow into the sand. 'It's a burrower,' said the Doctor. He shaded his eyes and scanned the surrounding beach. 'We
must
be getting close to the murderer,'

he muttered, 'because someone is trying to kill us.'

The pain in her hand was getting worse.
Injuries to the extremities don't hurt
. Who had said that? Moire had said that. Moire the Dalek Killer. I wonder what happened to her?

Concentrate, Summerfield, now is not the time for nostalgia.

'If it was supposed to kill us, why is it so small?'

'It had to be,' said the Doctor, 'to get past God's general scanning pattern.'

'How about poison then?' asked Bernice. Was that a burning tingling sensation in her injured hand or was it psychosomatic?

'Too risky,' said the Doctor. Bernice let out her breath. 'Around here if they can get to your brain stem within twelve hours they can grow you a new body in three months. Money back guaranteed.'

'Which means,' said Bernice, 'that either that thing eats very quickly or . . .'

'Or there's an awful lot of them,' said the Doctor. 'The one that bit you must have been in the nature of a probe. Scouting out our location for the main body. That's why I threw it so far. With a bit of luck that should have disorientated it enough to give us some breathing space.'

'Shouldn't we be using this breathing space by adopting the ever popular and universally famous plan B?'

'Not right now,' said the Doctor. 'Pass me one of the sandwiches, preferably one with a meat filling.'

Bernice almost said,
Now is not the time to be thinking about your stomach, Doctor
, but she was fairly certain that she'd used that line before. She found a ham-analogue sandwich in the hamper and passed it to the Doctor. She had a pretty fair idea what his plan was, just as she had expected the Doctor to tear a corner of the sandwich and toss it onto the beach.

'Any second now,' said the Doctor.

The torn bit of sandwich lay undisturbed on the sand. Bernice risked a quick peep at the wound in her palm. It was still bleeding but the skin around it wasn't decomposing or anything horrid. It still hurt like crazy though.

'Wait for it,' said the Doctor.

They waited for it, but Godot obviously had the day off.

A seabird landed by the sandwich in a flutter of strong grey wings. It pecked experimentally at the bread –

And vanished in an eruption of boiling sand and bloody feathers.

'Tell me you didn't do that on purpose,' said Bernice in a sick voice.

The Doctor shook his head. 'There's some good news and some bad news,' he said. 'Which do you want first?'

'Surprise me.'

'They're not very smart and if we remain completely still it will take them a while to locate us.

The bad news is that there are probably something in the order of two hundred thousand grubs out there and we're probably surrounded.' He paused as if remembering something. 'You've never been to Wales, have you?'

'We're in trouble, aren't we?'

The Doctor was rummaging in his pockets. 'We could be, except I still have
this
.' He pulled out his sonic screwdriver and looked around. 'Right,' he said. 'See any pockets of marsh gas?'

'No.'

'Any handy minefields?'

'No.'

'We might be in trouble.'

'Doctor,' said Bernice, 'should the beach be moving like that?'

The area of the beach around where the seabird had vanished was seething in an unpleasantly organic manner. Bernice was too far away to see clearly but she just knew that the effect was caused by thousands of grubs churning up the sand. She looked around. Another patch was writhing to her left, a third was to their right and a fourth behind them. The Doctor had guessed right, they
were
surrounded. All the patches creeping slowly forward, Bernice didn't have to be a genius at trigonometry to figure out where they were going to converge.

'Plan B,' said Bernice through gritted teeth, 'is beginning to seem like a viable option.'