Doctor Who_ Earthworld - Jacqueline Rayner [32]
Did the TARDIS have a wardrobe? Or at least a laundry? Thank goodness she’d kept spare knickers and a roll-on deodorant in her bag. She tried to surreptitiously sniff her right armpit. Still bearable. How much longer it would stay that way, though, with all the to-ing and fro-ing she was doing. . . She wasn’t particularly keen on walking in general – fifteen minutes to Canary Wharf tube in the morning, up and down the platform a few times, and then three minutes to the office at the other end. Same in reverse in the evening, with only a stroll to a restaurant or sandwich shop in between. Strictly A-to-B functional stuff.
No time for blisters to develop. And definitely no dinosaurs.
She was dealing with it now in an ‘it’s not quite real’ sense. She was outside her body, watching herself as though she were in a movie or a dream. There she was, just there, dressed in designer casuals, a Gucci bag over her shoulder, trekking across a future-prehistoric plain with three adolescent boys. There were monsters all around, and yes, theoretically they could kill her and she should be terrified, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that if they did attack, a sign would spring up saying GAME OVER and real life would begin again.
At the same time, her relations with the three boys seemed real and direct.
Zequathon and Beezee tended to lead the way, with Anji and Xernic paired behind. She was feeling very protective of the redheaded boy. And she’d revised her opinions of the others, too – they were loud and a bit aggressive, but ba-59
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sically ‘good kids’. Even Beezee, who still really wasn’t her type of person but was winding her up less now. Because they had to get on. These boys were all risking their lives to save someone they didn’t know. So she had to like them.
She’d asked Xernic to tell her about life on this strange, past-obsessed, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant-type world. She still didn’t really get it. It didn’t seem that different to her Earth in a lot of ways – fairly impersonal, with the welfare of a few more important than that of the masses, though the few preached the opposite (yup). Those in power were tolerated if not respected by most citizens (definitely yup), but even when the people disapproved of something, only a few – like the ANJI boys – actually did something about it (yup – and signing the odd petition at university didn’t count, she told herself ruefully). A reasonable percentage of New Jupitans (she extrapolated from Xernic’s impassioned ANJI sales pitch) thought that Earth was revered too much, moaned about it a bit in bars and thought it was a bit much that Earth didn’t even send them the odd aid package, and if they had to choose they’d be happy to go with the whole New Jupiter/own-identity thing. But no one was forcing them to choose, so they merrily plodded on their own sweet way and abided by the President’s rules (still sounding very familiar). There had been a few more rumblings than usual lately – and yes, it was possible that rebellion had been in the air
– but the promise of EarthWorld and the revenue it was expected to bring had successfully crushed them. Bread and circuses, thought Anji. People didn’t change.
The details were different, though. There were worries about the Presidential succession (it being a hereditary position, and the President’s children apparently insane and confined to the palace); and the attitude to death, as seen in the casual acceptance of capital punishment, seemed medieval too. And she hadn’t seen anyone apart from herself who looked other than white in appearance, which was a bit worrying. Terrifying thought: were they all extinct?
No, that was silly. Because thinking about it, there had been no comments, no pointing, not even a question. And that implied (a) she wasn’t the future equivalent of a dodo, and (b) a degree of generic tolerance here that she was very pleased to see, and