Doctor Who_ Hope - Mark Clapham [35]
As the day grew longer the hall began to fill up with the citizens of Hope rich enough to start their revels at lunchtime. Anji found herself becoming slightly selfconscious, aware of furtive glances in her direction. Fair enough, she thought. Humanity was an extinct species, and she could imagine the fuss if a velociraptor had wandered into her local back on Earth and sat in the corner with a pint of mild. If there was one thing Anji had learned during her travels with the Doctor, it was that dead things walking around tended to be the start of trouble.
Deciding to postpone trouble until at least midafternoon, Anji resumed her exploration of the Palace, away from the public gaze. Much of what she found was mundane; an office where the administrative work that kept the Palace running took place, kitchens where food and drink were prepared in a riot of steam and motion, dank corridors lined with barrels, storerooms full of boxes. Eventually, though, Anji found something of interest, an area of the Palace where rough metal gave way to clinical white walls, bright strip lights banishing the darkness from every corner.
Laboratories. Having travelled with the Doctor for quite a while, Anji knew the drill by now. She found a rack of protective clothing and pulled on a light blue environment suit. The suit was baggy, designed to go over full clothing, and sealed across the chest, a simple breath mask built into the hood. Anji rubbed the visor clean with her gloved hands, and proceeded through a glass panelled door into the labs proper.
The lab she entered seemed to be deserted, although Anji suspected the equipment operated itself most of the time. Certainly, the complex rig set up across one wall seemed to be quite happy unattended, bleeping and bubbling by itself. Anji took a closer look, and found some kind of breeding project. A spiny plant was growing in a vat of bubbling liquid, breeding like cells in a petri dish. She didnt recognise the sprouting green plant, but it looked fairly innocuous. On a bank of screens what looked like 3D models of DNA strands were rotating. Genetic modification of crops had been a tiresome news topic when Anji had left Earth, and she suspected that was what was going on in the lab, albeit in a highly advanced form. To the right of the breeding tank was a glassfronted refrigeration unit, in which sat a fat black flask. Checking in either direction to see that no one was about to burst in, Anji gingerly took the flask out of the fridge and placed it on the workbench. It looked like a thermos flask to Anji, which made the contents either a vital sample frozen in liquid nitrogen or someones coffee.
Anji twisted the lid open, and felt a vaguely cold sensation around her thickly gloved hands liquid nitro it was. She pulled out the lid, and the entire sample slid out, fixed into the inner casing with clamps, frozen solid.
Anji blinked. It was the Doctors apple core, frozen with liquid nitrogen. She quickly resealed the flask and placed it back in the refrigeratlon unit, then stared at the growing plant in the tank. She could vaguely make out the branch patterns of an apple tree. These people clearly thought growing apple trees was vitally important. Anji realised that with Earth and humanity gone, there probably were no apple trees any more. The Doctor had blithely restored to life what was potentially a longdead species, without even thinking about it.
Were there cosmic laws against this kind of thing? Was that the right thing to do? Anji looked at the baby tree, suspended in nourishing gel. It seemed harmless enough, almost benevolent, to bring apples to a world that didnt have them. What could be the harm in that?
But she also remembered the stories about apples she had been told when she was young. There was Adam and Eve,