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‘Then you accept the suggestion?’

– Life would be much less interesting if I didn’t.

‘Just a minute,’ said Chris, suddenly irked. ‘You’re trying to guess what my answer’s going to be, and I don’t even know what the two of you are talking about. What question?’

All eyes turned on him. Two of the Doctor’s, an infinite number of the Carnival Queen’s (and she had an infinite number more to spare).

‘Who do you trust?’ asked the Doctor. ‘Me or her?’

Chris looked at him as if he were mad. Then he looked at the Carnival Queen as if she were mad. He wasn’t sure which of them made his head hurt more.

‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Are you telling me that what I say now is going to change the whole history of the universe?’

The Doctor smiled weakly. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘What you say now will decide whether there is such a thing as history.’

Chris went white.

‘Right,’ he squeaked.

Aeons in the past, on a planet very near the centre of the galaxy, ancient automatic defence systems spontaneously activated themselves, and around the Capitol six hundred Time Lords simultaneously claimed to be possessed by the ghost of Morbius. In her office, the Lady President experienced an unexpected epileptic fit, during which she signed an order for three hundred prisoners to be released from a prison asteroid. Dragon tattoos snapped like flytraps on the arms of the convicts as they stepped out of stasis, and leading them was the ‘voodoo priest of the House of Lungbarrow’, the one they called Grandfather Paradox, who –

according to popular fable – had only escaped execution because everyone was more afraid of him dead than alive. An embryo in one of the gene-looms began scratching the blueprints of a demat-gun into the semiotic fluid that surrounded it. Murder was etched across the face of the planet. The Eye of Harmony winked.

‘Chris?’

Trust. Trust, that was the thing. What had his parents told him about trust? Or was it something about a frisbee? No, forget that. This was real life. Did he trust the Doctor? Of course he trusted the Doctor. The Doctor always did the right thing. The Doctor had saved his life hundreds of times, but then again, it had always been the Doctor who’d got him into trouble in the first place. Was that how Reason worked?

Correction. The Doctor did the right thing eventually.

Sacrifices along the way. Detrios. Sheol, Detrios. ‘You’re a liar and a user and quite possibly a murderer...’

– Chris?

The Carnival Queen. How long had he been here? Just an hour? Less? Time, no longer an important factor. Was that the real difference between her and the Doctor? Chris hardly knew her. Couldn’t know her. She was a vast and incomprehensible alien intelligence, yeah? Yeah, right. Like the Doctor wasn’t.

Her face. Marielle’s face. She’d shown him how to let the gynoids happen, and while his consciousness had been there, nestling under the sand, something had gone pop and the world couldn’t ever be the same again. Even the Doctor hadn’t seen the universe the way he was seeing it, right? That was it.

That was why he didn’t automatically trust the Doctor this time. Because the Doctor just didn’t know.

‘It’s all right, Chris. Concentrate.’

Concentration. Seeing the world through squinted eyes, like the Doctor saw it. History rolling along. Joy and pain.

Watching them building the concentration camps, watching them kill the red-headed children, because this was history and history must not be interfered with, no matter what. Even if people died (Kat’lanna died) and worlds were burned (Kat’lanna died) and the walls caved in (Kat’lanna died, probably), that was the way of the Doctor. He had his reasons.

He had his Reason.

– No, Chris. Don’t concentrate. Remember how it feels.

How it feels just to feel.

And here he was, Christopher Rodonanté Cwej, out in the desert, between the Devil and the deep blue eyes of the Doctor (green eyes, grey eyes, any old eyes), ready to make the decision, ready to kill millions of people with history or throw the whole shebang into an eternal darkness that might have been bad, might have been good,