Forrester turned, then wished she hadn"t when the inside of her skull failed to move as quickly as the outside. The man behind her looked as if he had just climbed out of a body-bepple tank. His golden fur glowed, his small black nose was moist and shiny and his little b.u.t.ton-eyes shone with health and vitality. He was so muscular that his robes were tight around his chest, and bulged at the seams. For a moment, Forrester hated him.
"Who the h.e.l.l are you?" she said.
"Cwej. Chris Cwej." His eyes scanned her in the usual way that people did when they were looking for examples of body-bepple. He"d have to look a lot closer than that if he wanted to see how she"d changed herself.
"Isn"t it p.r.o.nounced "Shvey"?" she asked.
"Nope." He shook his head. "Too many people got confused. I stick to "Cwej": it"s easier." He smiled. "I"m supposed to report to Adjudicator Secular Rashid.
Can you point me in his direction?"
Forrester sighed. " Her Her direction. Fresh out of the Academy?" direction. Fresh out of the Academy?"
Cwej"s smile widened. Forrester felt nauseous. n.o.body had a right to be that cheerful.
"No, I graduated last year. I"ve been on traffic patrol over in s.p.a.ceport Nine Overcity ever since."
"Of course you have," Forrester said, looking around for Rashid"s raft. "I"ve got to see the Adjudicator Secular myself. Follow me."
"Thanks. "Preciate it."
"Don"t mention it," Forrester snarled. This boy was going to get on her nerves pretty d.a.m.n fast.
15.
Bernice was sitting on the floor of the TARDIS boot cupboard when the Doctor found her. From the doorway, all he could see was her cross-legged form in the far distance, illuminated by a single beam of light. As he stepped inside the room, however, he realized that the shadows around her were filled with row upon row of shoes and boots, arranged in concentric circles, like a waiting audience. Burnished highlights shone back from cracked leather.
Bernice did not appear to have noticed him.
He picked his way cautiously through the boots, noticing step by step old friends whom he had thought lost for ever. There were the elastic-sided pair inside which he had hidden the TARDIS key when he was in the Ash-bridge Cottage Hospital. Next to them were the green rubber waders that he"d splashed about the marshes of Delta III in. Over to one side he saw the brogues that he"d been wearing when Kellman had electrified the floor of his room on Nerva Beacon. The heels were still charred. He smiled. Portrait of the Doctor as a collector of shoes. Time considered as a collection of worn-out footwear.
Clearing a s.p.a.ce, he sat beside Bernice. She was holding a tumbler of some amber fluid and gazing out across the sea of attentive boots. She had an old rag across her lap and a pair of Roman sandals beside her.
"Some people might think," she said suddenly, startling him, "that possessing several thousand pairs of shoes, boots and sandals indicated an obsessive personality."
"Nonsense," he replied. "Do you know how long I"ve lived? Over a millennium. Do you know how much footwear I"ve got through in that time? A lot.
A lot more than a lot."
"A mega-lot," Bernice muttered.
"Yes, a mega "
The Doctor trailed off into silence. Mega. A word he had not thought about for some time. Quite deliberately.
"Quite a few," he finished lamely.
"They don"t look worn out to me," Bernice said.
"Fashions change. Opinions alter. Location must be taken into account.
What looks good in the light of a red giant sun can cause severe embarra.s.sment on a planet circling a white dwarf. What one race might consider to be footwear fit for the G.o.ds might cause another to call for the fashion police."
He reached out and snared a pair of bright green shoes with orange spats.
Bernice winced when she saw them.
"Take these . . . " the Doctor started.
"No thanks!"
"I used to love these, once upon a body. Nowadays I wouldn"t be seen dead in them."16.
He caught Bernice"s sideways glance at the brushed suede shoes that he was wearing, and shifted his position slightly so that he was sitting on them. They sat in silence for a few moments, gazing out towards the sketchy shapes of the roundels in the shadows. Eventually, more to break the silence than for any other reason, the Doctor reached out and took the tumbler from Bernice"s hand. " Lch"thy-li Lch"thy-li!" he said, and gulped the liquid down.
""Lch"thy-li"?" She looked at him strangely.
"Berberese for "Here"s blood on your horns"."
"Oh." She shrugged, still eyeing him as if he had done something completely bizarre. "Well, the feeling"s mutual, I"m sure."
The Doctor knew that human emotions weren"t his strong point, but he took the plunge anyway. "There"s something wrong, isn"t there?" he said.
"And they said you were insensitive," she murmured.
"Who said?"
"n.o.body. I was joking."
"Would a holiday help?" His eyes gleamed.
"No thanks! Your holidays are more dangerous than your deliberate adventures."
He smiled, remembering some of his holidays. "Did I ever tell you about the time I had a tooth removed in the Old West?"
"Yes," Bernice said levelly.
"Oh. What about the effervescent oceans of Florana?"
"Yes."
"Oh. What about " He saw her face, and stopped.
"Doctor," she blurted suddenly, "Homeless Forsaken told me something just before he died something that"s been worrying me. He said I shouldn"t go back to Earth for the next few years. He said it wasn"t safe that something terrible was going to happen and he didn"t want it to happen to me." She sighed. "He said even though the Hith are notorious for being loners, he liked me too much to want to see me die."
"Earth," the Doctor mused. "Thirtieth century in Homeless Forsaken"s time.
A time of peace and prosperity: well, for the peaceful and prosperous, at least.
Run by the full panoply of an Imperial Court earls, viscounts and the rest and divided up into areas called s.p.a.ceports. Just like the old countries, except that they better reflect the socio-economic realities of life in the future. Not a pleasant place, as places go, but I wouldn"t want to lose it just yet." He was silent for a moment. "Does this have anything to do with our adventures on Oolis?" he said finally.
"No." She shook her head. "That was something else that he had got mixed up in."17.
The Doctor was silent for a few moments, remembering their time on Oolis.
Homeless Forsaken, Hith warrior, had been a drifter: a rootless, homeless member of a downtrodden race. He hadn"t talked about himself very much, but he had a sense of honour, and the Doctor had not known him to lie.
"The Hith," he mused. "As I recall, they lost a short but very nasty war with the Earth Empire " He took his gold hunter watch out of his pocket and consulted it. " four years or so ago. Their home world was terraformed, and the remnants of the Hith were left wandering around the galaxy in whatever s.p.a.ceships they could beg, borrow or run off with without paying s.p.a.ceport fees. I wouldn"t be surprised if they were intending to take some terrible revenge."
Bernice nodded. "I"ll never forget what Homeless Forsaken said about the despair of knowing that somebody had taken your planet away and wouldn"t give it back. Did he tell you about his name? Apparently all of the Hith have renounced their original names and taken new ones to remind them and the rest of the galaxy what happened to them. His full name was Homeless Forsaken Betrayed And Alone."
"You can imagine it, can"t you?" the Doctor said. "Some human security guard asks him who he is. "I"m Homeless Forsaken Betrayed And Alone,"
he replies. Pa.s.sive resistance. Gandhi would have been proud." He sighed, gazing out across the sea of shoes. "But getting back to this threat, we haven"t got much to go on. Is that all he said?"
"That"s it. Oh, he mentioned somewhere called s.p.a.ceport Five Overcity. He said that if I ever did go to Earth, to avoid going there."
The Doctor handed the tumbler back to her and stood up, feeling suddenly shaky. That amber liquid certainly packed a punch. "Then that"s where we go,"
he said. "My interest has been piqued."
Bernice sighed. "Yeah, that"s what I thought. I wasn"t sure whether to tell you or not, but I guess I had to in the end. I"d have felt guilty as h.e.l.l if we"d pitched up in thirtieth-century Earth in a few years" time, only to find it wasn"t there any more."
"Coming?"
She looked into the tumbler, and rolled the last few drops of amber fluid around. "Why not?" she said, frowning.
"Moping in the dark is a fruitless occupation, Bernice." He nodded towards the tumbler. "And besides, you drink too much already."
"Er, Doctor," she said carefully, "I think I should break some bad news to you.
I was looking for something to do, and I found this place, so I decided to clean some of your shoes. Trouble is, you"ve gone and drunk the polish."
18.
Waiting For Justice And Dreaming Of Home slithered through the waist-high ca.n.a.l, dreaming of past glories.
The dank, mossy walls of the Undertown rose on either side of him, but in his drunken stupor Waiting For Justice was gliding past the soft, warm bulkheads of a Hith battle cruiser, dressed not in rags and tatters but the black and silver body-sleeve of a navigator.
The bottle clenched in his pseudo-limb dribbled a milky liquid into the ca.n.a.l. Attracted by the unfamiliar taste something broke the surface for a brief moment and brushed against his thigh, but to him it was the slap of a holstered blaster.
He staggered sideways, and paused for a moment, resting against a wall.
Water cascaded down the brickwork, soaking his already moist body. He rotated his eyestalks unsteadily, and saw a faint image of the present overlaid on the past. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind a decision was made. He would head for home.
Laboriously he pulled himself up out of the water and sprawled headlong upon the narrow wooden walkway. Eventually, he surged up until his body was balanced on his muscular basal foot, and took a long swig from the bottle.
Something moved in the shadows.
"At last," a voice said. "The prodigal returns."
"Wha.s.sat?" he cried. He saw the blade as it arced through the air towards him, and was still trying to fit it into his fantasies when it slashed through his neck. As his lifeblood ebbed into the ca.n.a.l, and the blade cut away at him, he dreamed of battle in s.p.a.ce, and glory, and death.
The TARDIS materialized beside a moving walkway at the point where it pa.s.sed through the three hundred and first level of a residential tower in the Overcity.
Bernice stepped out of the time vessel, and was immediately carried away by the walkway. She gazed around, too surprised to cry out. The walkway was moving through an open plaza, around which shops and restaurants were cl.u.s.tered to attract pa.s.sing trade. It seemed to be early in the morning: most of the premises were either closed or were just opening up, and the walkway was almost deserted.
Bernice turned to look back at the TARDIS. The Doctor had placed his key in the TARDIS lock before stepping outside, and was hanging onto it like grim death. He was having to run backwards just to keep himself in the one spot.
As Bernice watched, he managed to lock the door and let go. The walkway carried him away from the TARDIS. He watched it recede with a forlorn expression upon his face, clutching his multicoloured umbrella for comfort.
Turning away with a resigned shrug, he raised his hat to an old couple who 19pa.s.sed by. They smiled, and waved back. A robot valet by their side waved as well.
"Do you think anybody will notice it there?" she called.
"I wouldn"t have thought so," the Doctor replied, walking along the strip towards her. "The TARDIS has an amazing capacity for being overlooked. So long as we remember where she is, we"ll be all right."
"I hope you"re right," Bernice said.
Ahead of them, the walkway plunged out of the tower entirely, spanning the s.p.a.ce across a rosy sky to a hole in the side of its nearest neighbour. Judging by the position of the sun, it was early morning. Looking ahead, she could see a number of towers strung along their path like stations on a monorail line.
She took a deep breath, and felt something inside her chest relax. There was something about the smell of Earth that couldn"t be duplicated.
The Doctor smiled as he joined her. "Aren"t I always?"
"I refuse to answer that question, on the grounds that it may incriminate you."
It suddenly occurred to Bernice that the Doctor was further away than he had been a few moments before. She looked down at the walkway. It was continuous between the two of them, but he was definitely moving slightly faster than she was.
"Doctor," she said, "we"re drifting apart."
"Don"t say that," he cried, shaking his head. "I know we"ve had our tiffs, but fundamentally we"re still friends!"
"No," she said, exasperated, "I mean, we"re physically physically drifting apart. This stuff we"re standing on isn"t solid. It"s more like a very thick liquid." drifting apart. This stuff we"re standing on isn"t solid. It"s more like a very thick liquid."
He looked around, then down at his feet. "You may be right."
He bent down to examine the material of the walkway: pressing it with his fingers, sniffing it and, to Bernice"s embarra.s.sment, licking it. She looked away, desperately hoping that n.o.body was watching, and cringed as she saw a group of people stepping on the edge of the walkway, where it appeared to be travelling extremely slowly.
"Interesting," he said, rising. "A single crystal exhibiting a high degree of thixotropic behaviour in a unilateral direction under the influence of an elec-tromagnetic current."
"What does that mean?" she asked, watching as the people walked closer to the centre of the strip and immediately began to accelerate.
"It means that this stuff that we"re standing on isn"t solid. It"s more like a very thick liquid."
"Fine. Thank you. That makes it all perfectly clear."
The walkway was filling up slowly, and Bernice noticed a number of offworlders amid the throng Arcturans, Alpha Centaurans, Thrillp and Foamasi.20.