Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [30]
‘No,’ said the Doctor firmly, fixing Calamee with his best Paddington Bear stare.
53
‘Madame Xing,’ pleaded Calamee, turning to the woman, ‘Tell him – tell him it’s safe. Tell him what an idiot he is.’
Madame Xing seemed to consider Calamee’s words for a moment.
‘The Doctor must make his own choices. He has reasons. Not necessarily the right ones, but the right now ones. We may not agree with them, but they are his to make.’
‘Calamee gave an exasperated sigh. ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You live in the present,’ she said. ‘What is right for you today may not be right tomorrow or yesterday. Who you are will not be the same tomorrow or yesterday.’
‘But without his memories, he’ll never be the same as he was yesterday, or a week ago or whenever.’
‘None of us is the same as we were yesterday. We recreate ourselves daily, reinvent, reimagine. Memory is not the fixed constant you imagine it to be.’
‘Is this more of that Zen stuff, whatever that is?’ Calamee sounded annoyed.
‘You remember the last time you saw your parents,’ said Madame Xing – as the light drifted back up from the Doctor’s hand to join its fellows above their heads. ‘And when you do, you restructure that memory. It is never the same twice.’
‘Of course it is,’ said Calamee scornfully.
‘It is not,’ stated Madame Xing. ‘But you are not aware of the changes because you have integrated them into the new memory. The act of remembering changes the memory itself.’
‘But it doesn’t change reality, does it?’
There was a gaping silence that the Doctor found profoundly disturbing. He really shouldn’t have got on to the subject of his memories and his amnesia.
Not now. Not here. But of course there was no way he could have known that, was there?
– Miranda, falling to her knees at his feet, her whole life racing across her features as the Time Winds tore through her.
‘We have to go,’ he said suddenly, gripping the edge of the table as if about to stand up. ‘Things to do, people to find, frying pans and fires.’ He looked at Calamee and tried to smile. ‘Cabbages and kings,’ he finished lamely.
‘Are you scared? Is that it?’ Calamee wouldn’t let it go. ‘Scared of what you’ll find out about yourself?’
– ‘I love you too, Father.’ Hugging her lifeless body to him, her hair pure white, a drift of virgin snow.
The Doctor looked across at Madame Xing.
‘Thank you,’ he said grimly. He glanced up at the ball of light, swaying above him. ‘What are you going to do with your recording?’
‘Keep it safely,’ said Madame Xing.
54
‘I Hope so,’ the Doctor said darkly. ‘I’d hate to think that it might fall into the wrong hands.’
‘It will not.’
He nodded thoughtfully.
‘It’s been very. . . interesting. . . meeting you, Madame.’
Madame Xing reached out across the table, her hand clenched into a fist, and opened it. Lying in her palm was a tiny light, a miniature version of the ones spinning around above the Doctor’s head. He frowned.
‘In case you change your mind,’ she said.
‘I won’t.’
– It felt, for a moment, like half of him had died there with her, sucked away into the Miranda-shaped void that her death had left to the world.
‘Then you will not need to use it.’
Reluctantly, he took it from her, holding the tiny sphere up to examine it.
‘Twenty-four hours,’ Madame Xing said. ‘That is how long you have.’
He nodded, fighting back the urge to tell her that, twenty-four hours or twenty-four centuries, he wouldn’t use it.
– And then he’d mourned, locked himself away at the heart of the TARDIS for so long that Fitz had come looking for him, banging on the door. And when he’d finally summoned up the strength to face them, he’d found eleven trays outside the door. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, all laid out, with little handwritten notes
– hoping he was OK, telling him that Trix had vanished, asking him to just write a message to let them know he was all right, saying that he’d found Trix in the TARDIS’s library, worrying that the milk smelled off and that Trix had untied the cow and it had wandered off and did the