Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [2]
It was the corpse of something that had died struggling.
It was the corpse of a small dog.
Sarah remained silent as they crossed the surface of Quiescia, not being able to think of anything remotely worthwhile to say. The Doctor more or less ignored her, and concentrated on dragging the wooden casket behind him. The bottom of the box made nasty crunching sounds against the blue pebbles, but the atmosphere seemed to soak up the noise, turning it into nothing more than a muffled scratching. Even the air here has tact, Sarah reflected.
They stopped at the top of a low hill, where the stones beneath their feet were tinted violet by a sun that was either slowly setting or slowly rising. The sun was huge and red, but seemed to give off very little heat. Sarah pulled her hands into the sleeves of her jumper, while the Doctor began sifting through the rocks on the hilltop around them. Quiescia was nothing but rocks, apparently. As far as the eye could see, everything was blue and jagged, a landscape of cerulean plateaus and lumpy turquoise mountains.
Eventually, the Doctor found a rock that was roughly the same size as a tombstone, and began burning letters into its surface with his screwdriver thingummy. Without waiting for instructions, Sarah started digging, pushing the pebbles and the cobalt-coloured earth aside until she’d made a hole big enough for the casket. Once his work had been completed, the Doctor balanced the tombstone at the head of the grave.
He’d carved the name LAIKA into the rock in block capitals, without dates or descriptions. The Doctor tugged the casket towards the hole, momentarily catching Sarah’s eye and giving her a fleeting smile (of gratitude, she supposed) before the box slid into its final resting place.
‘The first traveller ever to leave the Earth,’ he said, as he stood before the grave. His voice was tired and fragile, little more than a whisper. ‘1957. The Sputnik Two experiment. Sent out into the dark places without any way of getting home again. Alone and abandoned.’
Sarah lowered her eyes. She wasn’t sure why.
‘Why do I care?’ she heard the Doctor mutter.
He scooped up a handful of blue dirt, and let it slip through his fingers onto the lid of the casket. After that, there was silence. There were no native life-forms on Quiescia, Sarah noted, no predators or scavengers or any of nature’s other little graverobbers, despite the breatheable atmosphere. And come to think of it, where was the air coming from, if there weren’t any trees? Briefly, she wondered if this whole world had been set up by the Doctor, put here purely for the purposes of the burial.
‘This is the furthest system in Earth’s galaxy,’ the Doctor explained, gently. Sarah wondered if he was addressing her, or the occupant of the coffin. ‘As far out as you can wander. As good a place to rest as any. Yes. As good a place as any.’
Sarah said nothing. They stood by the grave for a few minutes more before heading back to the TARDIS.
‘Well?’ Sarah asked.
On the scanner, a purple-veined planet basked in the light of its sun. Quiescia, Sarah realised, seen from the quiet side of the ionosphere. The capsule had already vanished from the floor of console room.
‘Sent back into space,’ the Doctor told her, his attention fixed on the console again. ‘“Things come from the void, and return to the void.”’
‘You know the answer really, don’t you?’
The Doctor looked up at her, furrowing his brow.
‘On the planet,’ Sarah elaborated. ‘You asked why you cared. Oh, come on. You know why you care. I know I do.’
He paused for a moment, as if wondering whether to take her seriously or not. ‘Do you?’ he asked.
Sarah nodded. ‘You buried Laika,’ she said. ‘But...’
Then the TARDIS folded itself out of existence, and the sentence was finished in an entirely different galaxy.
A hundred