Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [26]
‘Don’t know him,’ he said. ‘Never heard of him.’
‘Are you sure?’ she persisted.
‘I’ve never even heard the name before,’ he shouted.
The woman looked at him in some concern, her gaze travelling across his dry, cracked skin, his painfully thin and scarred body. ‘Here,’ she said, passing him the container of food. ‘Have some of this.’
The Doctor leaned forward towards Powerless Friendless. ‘May I ask a question?’ he said.
Powerless Friendless retracted his eyestalks slightly. ‘What sort of question?’ he asked.
44
‘Those scars,’ the Doctor began, indicating the gnarled, twisted flesh of Powerless Friendless’s upper torso and the nubs of his retracted pseudo-limbs.
Powerless Friendless flinched. He didn’t like being reminded of – of his scars.
They made him think about . . .
‘Scars?’ he asked, trying to quell the seething unease in his mind.
‘Do you mind telling me where you got them from?’
Powerless Friendless opened and closed his mouth, trying to find the right words, but they were gone, gone wherever the memories had gone. ‘I – I don’t remember,’ he said finally.
The Doctor frowned. ‘It looks to me,’ he said slowly, ‘as if you have been tortured. Quite comprehensively tortured. I would be surprised if you could forget something like that.’
Powerless Friendless extruded a pseudo-limb and ran it over the twisted flesh as if he had never really seen it before.
‘And that number burned into your tail,’ the Doctor continued remorselessly.
‘Where did it come from? Who did it to you?’
The knife flashed in the half-light of his cell, drawing a line of agony across his flesh.
‘An old-fashioned device,’ a human voice said, ‘but then, I am an old-fashioned man. You may find this difficult to believe, but I am over a thousand years old.’
Powerless Friendless screamed.
Springing up, he backed away from them, pseudo-limbs held up as if to ward them off. Before they could stop him, he had turned and slithered out of the plaza, leaving his hag’jat behind, trying to block the words, the memories from his mind A spindly bot with an emblem on its chest tried to stop him, but he slithered under its four outstretched arms and across the plaza. It grabbed for him, its metal feet thumping the ground as it ran, but it only succeeded in grabbing the fedora from his head. The hat caught at his eyestalks, but he pulled away, panic-stricken.
Homeless Forsaken Betrayed And Alone. A name that held associations for him. Unpleasant associations. Things he had done his best to forget. Things that he had paid people to help him forget.
Things that seemed to be bobbing to the surface, whether he wanted them to or not. Ghosts from the past.
The bot was following him. Perhaps the Doctor and Bernice had sent it after him. Or perhaps . . .
No. Not that thought. Not now. He dived into the nearest null-grav shaft, then out at the next junction. Using guile, skill and his knowledge of the myriad levels of the Overcity, he began to make his way towards the best access point to the Undertown. Within moments, the bot was out of sight.
45
Memories flitted through his mind. Faces and places that he thought had been buried. Old times. Painful times. As he exited the shaft and transferred onto a walkway, he tried to suppress them, but they were too strong. His old life was breaking through the patina of conditioning that had formed over it, and there was nothing he could do about it.
It was as if he had two parallel sets of memories: two identities. There was Powerless Friendless the anonymous musician and down-and-out whose body was covered in odd scars and who lived in the Undertown. And there was the other, the space pilot who appeared to him in dreams. The hero. The one who went away.
He made his way back towards the Undertown. It may not have been home, but it was the best he had.
Cwej was still shaking when Forrester led him into the refectory raft. The place was crowded with off-duty and resting Adjudicators. A scent of coffee and frying soy-bacon hung in the air. Simcords of alien forests and seas hung on the walls,