Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [125]
‘What’s happening, Fitz?’
Sensimi and her father were staring agog at the display, and he heard Sensimi explaining how it had ‘all been maggots’ before.
‘When you’ve all finished admiring the floral arrangements,’ came a familiar voice, ‘I’d appreciate a bit of help over here.’
226
Fitz turned to see the Doctor, with a bundle that could only be Trix, thrown over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He was struggling to disentangle himself from the split in Tain’s tree.
The Doctor coughed pointedly as he got his foot caught in the base of the opening and nearly dropped Trix on the grass. Fitz rushed over and took her weight, helping to lay her down on the ground. He pulled back as he saw her properly. Something large and hairy was wrapped across her neck and chest, covering her face.
‘Is that Nessus?’ said Calamee. She glanced back, instinctively, to where she’d left him.
‘Think of him as a mini-Tain for now,’ the Doctor said, making sure Trix was comfortable. ‘He’s keeping her breathing until her own cerebellum remembers what it’s there for. Then you’ll have your old Nessus back.’
‘Fitz,’ said the Doctor gently, taking him by the arm and pulling him to one side, ‘I can’t pretend to understand quite what your message to Tain was about, and I’m not sure I want to know. But it worked.’
‘So Tain’s alive?’
‘And Reo’s gone.’ The Doctor looked at him, something expectant in his eyes as if waiting for an explanation. Fitz wasn’t quite sure he could give one – or whether he ought to even try. He settled for ‘Good’.
He watched Calamee as she took hold of Trix’s hand and squeezed it: she’d heard him talking to Tain through the flycam; she’d heard him ask Tain to recreate Nessus. This can’t have been what she was expecting.
‘But how. . . ?’ said Calamee, looking up at the Doctor. ‘I mean. . . ’
The Doctor raised his hands. ‘Perhaps you should ask Fitz here – he’s the man of the moment.’
Fitz waved the Doctor’s comment away. ‘You were the one that went down there,’ he said. ‘Not me.’
‘Oh, I think you were there,’ said the Doctor, standing up with a tired groan.
‘In spirit, if not in flesh.’
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Chapter 28
‘We used to be happy with a walnut and a tangerine.’
The Doctor had gone for a walk.
Fitz didn’t know where, hadn’t wanted to ask. But he thought he knew why. He didn’t want to be around when Fitz explained it all. It made a change: normally it was Fitz – or Anji or Trix – with the ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand, Doctor’. But as Trix lay on the grass, the rising and falling of Nessus’s back obscuring her face, all eyes were on him.
He explained it as well as he could, but even with the Doctor’s ghost rattling around in his head, he didn’t think he was doing it justice. The Imperator and Sensimi just stared at him, as if it was all going to suddenly, come clear to them. He didn’t have the heart to tell them that it probably wouldn’t.
‘But how did what you said to Tain make it all happen?’ asked Calamee.
‘Without that Reo thing cottoning on and stopping it?’
Fitz gave a huge, stupid shrug. ‘I dunno – one minute me and you were talking, and the next. . . ’ His voice tailed off. He remembered what the Doctor had said, the choice he’d offered between forgetting and remembering – and, out of nowhere, he’d suddenly thought of the Remote and what they’d done to him. ‘I had this flash of memory,’ he said. ‘I remembered – if you’ll pardon the pun – being remembered.’
‘What?’
‘A long time ago, something happened to me. I died. And then I was brought back to life by being recreated. Being remembered. That’s what they called it.
I was copied.’ He looked up and down at himself. ‘I am a copy. A remembered copy.’ The word was starting to sound stupid, made-up. Like him. Once upon a time, he knew, that thought would have screwed with his head, made him feel almost physically sick – the fact that he was just an ersatz Fitz. But now. . .
some things you just had to accept and live with. It wasn’t as if he felt any different. But then how would he know?
Calamee