Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [126]
Jason scratched his chin. ‘You got all that from a single sentence?’ he said, obviously impressed with my genius.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, beaming.
Kitzinger sat down on the floor next to me and I brushed the grit out of her hair. ‘That’s why I had to stop you killing Iranda. Because otherwise the Sunless wouldn’t have ever got what they wanted and would have taken out their frustrations on us.’
She asked me what I thought would happen to them. And I told her that I wasn’t sure. ‘We need to send a message to Earth about Ursu’s plight. But I doubt it will prove too difficult to drive the Sunless from the planet, particularly not now that their own world has been given a reprieve.’
‘We will still have to rejoin the rest of the galaxy. Ursu will never be as I remembered it.’
‘Without the Blooms to make Eights? No,’ I said, ‘I suppose it won’t.’
Extract ends
Jason was content to listen to the two women as they spent a couple of hours animatedly discussing their theories about the origin of the device. Despite her deathly make-up, blackened teeth and bald head, he had never seen Bernice look so radiant. So alive.
Bernice and Kitzinger offered their differing theories with a great deal of enthusiasm, interrup-tions and hand gestures. Kitzinger believed that the Blooms had been created by the ancestors of the Sunless before their society collapsed. It was a classic pattern, she said, repeated throughout the universe. Bernice disagreed, suspecting that the Sunless were actually the servants of the Bloom-makers, and had, at least originally, been artificially grown from the Blooms themselves.
This made sense to Jason, as it accounted for their eyes being similar to Iranda’s.
Jason somehow doubted that the companies had really not known of the presence of the Sunless before they had begun their ‘salvage operation’. And their theft of the cloning machines had left the Sunless to scratch out a meagre existence on their increasingly inhospitable world. The Sunless had given up everything in order to stay alive. He thought about his own youth, hanging about Piccadilly and later in grubby interstellar terminals. He remembered the things he’d done just to get by, just to stay a few steps ahead of starvation or hypothermia. He felt a little sym-pathy for the ashen-faced creatures for the first time.
On the way to her cabin Bernice came across Tameka, who had tucked herself away in the medical bay. The young woman was hunched over Iranda’s ’puter. A medical program flickered blue light over her face. When she saw Bernice she quickly suspended the screen. Bernice backed away. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.’
‘Hey, it’s OK. Wait up,’ Tameka exclaimed, calling her back.
Bernice sat down beside her on the examination couch. Tameka had washed the pale foundation from her face. Her skinhead haircut only served to make her face more angular. Her thick eyebrows stood out further. Her eyes looked a little puffy. Bernice wondered if she had been crying.
‘What is it?’
Tameka reactivated the screen she had tried to hide. ‘I just discovered that I’m pregnant.’
‘What?’ Bernice exclaimed. ‘Who? Not Emile, surely?’
‘Oh give me a break! Scott.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah, “Oh”.’
‘Didn’t you – ’
‘I didn’t think I needed to! You were the one who told me that they used bloody giant clams to make babies!’
‘Yeah, I was, wasn’t I?’ Benny slipped her arm around her. ‘Ursulans can’t have children with each other.’ She shrugged. ‘Perhaps only the women are infertile. Perhaps . . . well perhaps after the blooms were taken life found a way. Who knows? How do you feel about it?’
‘Dunno. A bit shocked really.’
‘Yeah, I can imagine. Do you still want to come back to Dellah?’
‘Well, I’m not about to set up home with the dragon boy am I?’
‘No?’
‘No. Well for starters I’ve already got a boyfriend.’ She winced suddenly. ‘Oh shit, how am I going to explain scales to Porl? But mostly because “falling in love” is yet another of those profiteering concepts Scott claims not to understand.’
‘Ah. But shagging indiscriminately is no doubt a well-respected Ursulan