And the rumble was right there and she felt it lift her off her feet and there was nothing to hold on to and she was running, running with thousands pressing into her on all sides glimpses of fur feathers scales all crowding her view a stampede along the bridge, full of hounds and men and bulls and more.
Half-lion-half-eagles, half-man-half-lizards, wolves with glittering implants and ruby-laser eyes, catsandratsandelephants and anything else she could imagine, all running with the speed of panic. Flooding her with the smell of sweat and struggle. The sound of running cramming her head full of noise and music and thunder. The current swept her along the edge of the bridge, tried to pull her over because they had to move, that move, that way, no matter what, the fury pulled them on. And so many different people jostling and shoving inside her skin and trying to tear out and run on their own, till she couldn"t feel what was herself any more and it wasn"t going to stop and she couldn"t stop and she HAD TO way, no matter what, the fury pulled them on. And so many different people jostling and shoving inside her skin and trying to tear out and run on their own, till she couldn"t feel what was herself any more and it wasn"t going to stop and she couldn"t stop and she HAD TO STOP They found her down by the toll plaza, clinging to the guard rail till her palms 91.bled and screaming her throat raw.
Chapter Eight.
The Memory Cheating Ain"t What it Used to Be.
"That was the first pulse," said the Doctor.
They were driving and she was in the back seat. The Doctor had left Fitz to look after her while he brought the car, saying don"t move her, don"t let her move. She didn"t know how long it had taken. He must have decided it was OK to move her then because they had laid her down on the chilly vinyl, trying to make her comfortable, but there wasn"t a lot of room in the back of a Bug.
The Doctor had shed his coat and laid it over her.
Now he was a million miles away, in the front seat of the Bug.
"They"ll happen more and more often as we get closer to the end," he said. He glanced at her in the rearview mirror. "If you hadn"t managed to pull yourself free, the wave of energy would have swept you all the way back to the scar."
"And once she hit that. . . " said Fitz.
Sam said nothing.
The Doctor went on, "It"s part of the healing process, the process of forming new structure over the damage to s.p.a.ce-time. The energy surge closes in on the scar from all around, like a ripple in reverse. That ripple becomes the beacon, pulsing in the higher dimensions. Not a pleasant thing to be caught in the middle of. . . "
Sam said even more nothing.
The toll-booth man had a phone in there. He was complaining about the bicycle race that had just come charging through without warning there wasn"t one scheduled for today, was there? Nah, someone else was disagreeing, it was a protest rally, a big demonstration.
So why did it look like the Wild Hunt to me?
She said nothing.
Out the opposite window she could just see the vast ripples in the water below, spreading outward across the bay as something big stirred in its sleep.
93 "I didn"t see anything," Fitz said, as they drove on. "Just a split-second. . .
sense of a lot of somethings going past. And then I looked up, and you"d just vanished."
He twisted in his seat to look at her. His face creased in concern.
This is it, she thought. When you feel like you"re a dot on the back of your own skull, looking out through your own eyes from a distance. This is what it"s like to lose it. You can see it there in front of you, but you don"t really feel like you need to reach out and get it back.
"There"s something else," said the Doctor.
She turned her head, and his face drifted into view. He was waiting for her to prompt him. What? What? she wanted to say. she wanted to say.
"Well," said the Doctor, "coming into contact with the scar was what disrupted our Sam in the first place. It seems to have a destabilising effect on her biodata for, ah, some reason which I"m not really clear on at the moment. . . " The Doctor paused. Sam felt the car slow as he braked at a stoplight. Maybe he was waiting for her to ask for those reasons.
Finally he turned to look at her, his face gently concerned. "To cut a long story short, each time the disruption wave from the scar pa.s.ses through, it has the same effect on you."
What? she thought. she thought. What? What? she shrieked. "What?" she mumbled. she shrieked. "What?" she mumbled.
"You"re not quite the Sam you were five minutes ago. Little bits of your biodata, your history, have been banged around."
"How do you know that?" said Fitz.
"It"s elementary physics," the Doctor snapped. Sam jumped, but only on the inside. "What I was learning when you would have been playing with building blocks."
"All right," said Fitz, "point taken."
She managed, "I"ve changed again. . . "
"Well, a little bit. A detail here or there." The wheel spun in the Doctor"s hands as he turned a corner. He kept glancing back at her, but he couldn"t really look, and that made it harder for her to be sure she was still there. "A few little things that don"t quite fit with what the rest of the universe remembers."
So I"m not real, she said, but the words didn"t make it out.
"But I remember. . . "
"Of course you do." He nodded calmly. "It"s just that what the rest of the world remembers about you is different to what you remember about you."
He wasn"t a person. He was a machine for dumping bad news on her. Pushing her ever further away from the front of her head.
94.He was still babbling in the front seat, talking to Fitz now. "Most of the changes are bound to be minor ones. She can"t be diffracted into any really radical alternatives. It"s always got to be a Sam who would have been here at the same time, the same place."
She was trying hard to answer.
"Except for the first time it happened?" said Fitz.
She was trying hard to scream, to kick the back of the seat, to pull the Doctor"s hair, to smash the windows.
"Yes, well, our Sam was a bit of a special case. As for the chance of this version happening to turn back into her, well, it"s about as likely as her turning into Margaret Thatcher, really. . . "
She cried. She didn"t have to make any effort to cry. It just fell out of her.
The Doctor squeezed the Bug into a parking s.p.a.ce opposite the plaza. He reached back to Sam, touched her face with his fingers, lifting her head until she couldn"t look away.
"Sam," he said. Gentle. Relentless. "Sam, listen to me. I need you to tell me about where I took you to dinner last night. Sam? Where was it? What was it like?"
"Garlic. . . that garlic place," she mumbled. She could barely see him, through the distance, through the haze. "Pasta. I had pasta. You had ice cream."
"What kind of ice cream?" he insisted.
"You had garlic ice cream!" She sat up. "Heh. That"s disgusting!"
His face was in focus at last. He nodded thoughtfully, looking relieved.
"Thank you."
Fitz was hanging over the back of his seat. "So does that tell you how far she"s been knocked off her old timeline?"
The Doctor looked baffled. "What good would that do? No, it"s just that she was dissociating."
He slid out of the Bug, tugged the seat forward, and offered her a hand to climb out. "l just needed to get you to connect with your memories. With the world around you."
"But what if they"re not true?" she whispered.
He smiled. "Then I got you to engage your imagination."
They crossed the street to the plaza, and the Doctor set her down gently on the rim of a splashing fountain. The air was crisp with spray. She felt here, now, almost back to herself. Whoever that was.
95 Fitz knelt on the ground, trying to get into her line of sight, but before he could say anything she saw his eyes move from her face, along the arm the Doctor had around her, up to the Doctor"s body pressed close beside her. He lowered his head and looked away.
"Look," said Fitz, "I"ve got to go and ring up some of my contacts, see if they"ve got any leads on the men in grey. The ones we didn"t get to when we were. . .
well, see you in a few minutes. Just. . . "
He hesitantly took hold of her free hand and met her eyes. "Don"t break," he said simply. "You don"t have to. All right?"
Fitz got up and headed for the entrance of the shopping centre. "I mean, if she she was tough enough not to lose it, was tough enough not to lose it, you you should have no problem." should have no problem."
"I"m not her." Her voice was almost lost in the splash of the fountain. "I"m not me either," she murmured.
The Doctor was staring at her, his pocket watch clasped in his hand. "What on Earth makes you say that?"
She didn"t answer for a while, watching the fountain play, jets splattering inward towards the mermaids in the centre. Where the water hit the water it was constantly churning, a ma.s.s of conflicting ripples. Never still. Never the same.
"You said I"m a different version now to what really happened," she said. "So some of my memories are lies lies " "
" Which Which memories?" He grasped her by the shoulders and fixed her with a wide-eyed stare. "Who did you invite to your sixth birthday party?" memories?" He grasped her by the shoulders and fixed her with a wide-eyed stare. "Who did you invite to your sixth birthday party?"
"Uhh "
"What did you wear to work on the Tuesday before last? Five minutes ago, was your pulse rate seventy or seventy-one? You could change all of those things, and not even you would notice. Why would that make you not still you?"
The words were so rapid-fire, she couldn"t get a thought in, but she had to hit back at them or else. "You think not knowing is supposed to help," she said.
"You don"t get it. I don"t have clue one one any more " any more "
"How long have you been a vegetarian?"
"Twelve years "
"Good, because that"s what you said the other day. See?"
"And how am I supposed to know?" she snapped. "Do I have to rely on you to know who I am? "Cause I"m not going for that. But I"ve got no facts at all! Not about what"s real, about my past "
"Oh, who cares cares?" cried the Doctor.
96.She jumped as if she"d been slapped.
"Sorry, sorry, I"m still not very good at this patience thing." He raised his hands to her face, pressing gently against her cheeks. "I don"t mean to say it"s not disorientating, or big, or scary," he said, gently again. "But it just seems so obvious obvious to me, it doesn"t to me, it doesn"t matter matter."
He leapt to his feet, to start pacing hang on, he"d put his feet down on the wrong side of the rim. He was striding right through the middle of the fountain. "Whatever history you have in your head right now, the next time the Wild Hunt comes through, it"s all going to change again. So why pay attention to it at all?"
Sam looked around, but no one was giving them a second glance. The Doctor was so hyped up, he probably wasn"t even aware that he was sloshing through a few inches of water. Besides, he was still too damp from before for it to matter.
"Look," she said, "you"ve got to know the past matters. You you time travel!"
"Just because I live in the past doesn"t mean I live in the past." He turned on his toes and leaned in close to her challenging her, cajoling her. "A while ago you said you just are who you are, right now. . . "
"Did I?" she asked pointedly.
"What does it matter? Do you agree with it?" The Doctor threw his arms wide with frustration. "Because all that isn"t who you are, it"s who you were were."
Sam stood up, wobbling on her feet. The Doctor was reaching a hand to her from the middle of the fountain. His voice had gone quiet and firm. "It doesn"t matter what you were doing fifteen minutes ago. You"ve got one moment, right now. It won"t last. What are you going to do with it? Well?"
I am who I am, she thought. Whoever the h.e.l.l that is. Well, it does sound like the kind of thing I"d say.
She took a step forward and splashed into the fountain. The Doctor"s hand caught her as she stumbled in. She felt giddy, not quite attached to the ground.
But she was still here, could still walk and talk and still kick a big splash of water right at the Doctor.
"So can I choose which of my memories are the fake ones?"
He shrugged, grinning, shaking water at her. "While you"re here why not?"
"All right, then, my boss. Dave. And his lousy taste in ties too. I don"t believe in him any more he"s just a bad dream." She heard herself beginning to laugh.
Maybe Dave would be waiting for her after all when she got back to London, but for now he just didn"t matter. She was with the Doctor.
"That"s the spirit," he said. "One nice solid possibility is worth a million airy-fairy facts." And he leapt aside and with a laugh sent a huge sploosh of water 97 right back into her face.
By the time Fitz got back, both of them were drenched to the skin and grinning like idiots. Sam was trying to chase down a lone Mandelbrot, which was paddling frantically around the sculpted turtles in the fountain.
"h.e.l.lo, children," he said, dodging Sam"s splash. "I"ve just been talking to Walter Markowitz, the Frigidaire king of Adeleine Street. He"s just seen two Henches."
"Where?" said the Doctor.
"Berkeley. I rang his carphone he"s tailing them now. Everybody out of the pool."
The Doctor leapt out, sprinting for the Bug.
Fitz called, "What about towelling off first?"